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These Truths
960 pages
A sweeping, lyrical reckoning with the American experiment that measures the nation's brutal realities against its founding ideals.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like standing at the center of a vast, turbulent panorama of American history. It is a steady, sweeping journey that balances the grand scale of centuries with the intimate, often heartbreaking realities of individual lives. The prose is elegiac and fiercely intelligent, pulling you through the contradictions of a nation built on both profound ideals and brutal subjugation. The mood is weighty and urgent, steeped in a contemplative atmosphere that demands you look unflinchingly at the past. It delights readers who want their history to be both a masterful narrative and a rigorous moral reckoning. You will emerge from its pages with a sobering, deeply enriched understanding of the fragile, ongoing experiment of democracy.
- Mood
- weighty
- contemplative
- urgent
- sobering
- Tone
- elegiac
- authoritative
- inquisitive
- unflinching
- lyrical
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the fragility of democracy · ideals versus reality · the legacy of slavery · the evolution of truth · the struggle for equality
- The writing
- Elegiac and narrative-driven, weaving grand historical synthesis with sharp, intimate biographical portraits.
- The arc
- Begins with the ambitious, flawed promise of a new world and journeys through centuries of brutal struggle, arriving at a sobering, urgent reflection on the modern era.
- Who it's for
- History buffs and civic-minded readers seeking a beautifully written, unvarnished reckoning with the American past.
Content notes
- slavery
- racism
- war
- systemic violence
- political disenfranchisement
About the book
"In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian... Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history. Written in elegiac prose, Lepore's groundbreaking investigation places truth itself--a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence--at the center of the nation's history. The American experiment rests on three ideas--'these truths, ' Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, on a fearless dedication to inquiry, Lepore argues, because self-government depends on it. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? [This book] tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation's truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology, from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine, from talk radio to twenty-first-century Internet polls, from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act, from the printing press to Facebook News. Along the way, Lepore's sovereign chronicle is filled with arresting sketches of both well-known and lesser-known Americans, from a parade of presidents and a rogues' gallery of political mischief makers to the intrepid leaders of protest movements, including Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist orator; William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate and ultimately tragic populist; Pauli Murray, the visionary civil rights strategist; and Phyllis Schlafly, the uncredited architect of modern conservatism. Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. 'A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history, ' Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. 'The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden, ' [this book] observes. 'It can't be shirked. 'There's nothing for it but to get to know it'"--Jacket.
Description from Open Library.
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