Historiography

2023
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “Data Driven: What's It All For?” The New Yorker. Article
These Truths: A History of the United States. Inquiry Edition
The United States was founded on a set of “self-evident” truths: political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But how well has the nation—from its revolutionary birth to our fractious present—lived up to these founding ideals? In an absorbing, character-driven narrative, acclaimed historian Jill Lepore engages this urgent question. Now expanded into a two-volume textbook, the Inquiry Edition is a new kind of history text—one that highlights the importance of analyzing evidence and practicing historical inquiry to help students develop civic skills relevant to their lives far beyond the course.
Lepore, Jill. 2023. “What the January Sixth Report is Missing.” The New Yorker, January 16, 2023. Article
The Deadline: Essays
Lepore, Jill. 2023. The Deadline: Essays. New York: W.W. Norton. Publisher's Version Abstract
A book to be read and kept for posterity, The Deadline is the art of the essay at its best.
 

Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented—but armed—aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore’s life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead.” Echoing Gore Vidal’s United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay—and of history—itself.

2021
Lepore, Jill. 2021. “New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan.” Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 2 (2).
Lepore, Jill. 2021. “Is Society Coming Apart?” The Guardian. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2021. “The Invention of the Week.” The New Yorker, November 21, 2021. Article
2020
Lepore, Jill. 2020. “The Trump Papers.” The New Yorker, November 23, 2020. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2020. “How "America the Beautiful" Was Born.” National Geographic, November 3, 2020. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2020. “Let History, Not Partisans, Prosecute Trump.” Washington Post. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2020. “Blood on the Green: Kent State and the war that never ended.” The New Yorker, May 4, 2020. article
Lepore, Jill. 2020. “In Every Dark Hour.” The New Yorker, February 3, 2020. Article
2019
Lepore, Jill. 2019. “Taking History Personally.” Times Literary Supplement.
Lepore, Jill. 2019. “One Small Step.” The New York Times Book Review. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2019. “On These Truths.” Public Seminar, May 9, 2019. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2019. “A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story.” Foreign Affairs March/April. Article
This America: The Case for the Nation
Lepore, Jill. 2019. This America: The Case for the Nation. New York: Liveright. Book Abstract

From the acclaimed historian and New Yorker writer comes this urgent manifesto on the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century.

At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America, a follow-up to her much-celebrated history of the United States, These Truths.

With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise, Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, repudiates nationalism here by explaining its long history—and the history of the idea of the nation itself—while calling for a “new Americanism”: a generous patriotism that requires an honest reckoning with America’s past.

Lepore begins her argument with a primer on the origins of nations, explaining how liberalism, the nation-state, and liberal nationalism, developed together. Illiberal nationalism, however, emerged in the United States after the Civil War—resulting in the failure of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the restriction of immigration. Much of American history, Lepore argues, has been a battle between these two forms of nationalism, liberal and illiberal, all the way down to the nation’s latest, bitter struggles over immigration.

Defending liberalism, as This America demonstrates, requires making the case for the nation. But American historians largely abandoned that defense in the 1960s when they stopped writing national history. By the 1980s they’d stopped studying the nation-state altogether and embraced globalism instead. “When serious historians abandon the study of the nation,” Lepore tellingly writes, “nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism.” But liberalism is still in there, Lepore affirms, and This America is an attempt to pull it out. “In a world made up of nations, there is no more powerful way to fight the forces of prejudice, intolerance, and injustice than by a dedication to equality, citizenship, and equal rights, as guaranteed by a nation of laws.”

A manifesto for a better nation, and a call for a “new Americanism,” This America reclaims the nation’s future by reclaiming its past.

 

“A sharp, short history of nationalism.... A frank, well-written look at the dangers we face. We ignore them at our peril.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

 

“Urgent and pithy… Readers seeking clear and relevant definitions of political concepts will appreciate this brisk yet thorough, frank, and bracing look at the ancient origins of the nation state versus the late-eighteenth-century coinage of the term ‘nationalism’ and its alignment with exclusion and prejudice.” — Booklist

“A hopeful book for all who believe that America's ideals are stronger than our demagogues.” — Michael Bloomberg

 

2018
Lepore, Jill. 2018. “Misjudged: How Justice Ginsburg overcame the distrust of feminists.” The New Yorker, October 8, 2018. Article
Lepore, Jill. 2018. “The Hacking of America.” The New York Times. Article

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