Description

“Not anything in need of a masterpiece.”―NPR Books
A New York Times and Washington Post Striking Ebook of the Year

In probably the most formidable one-quantity American historical past in many years, award-profitable historian Jill Lepore gives a magisterial account of the origins and upward push of a divided country.

Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American prior” (New York Instances Ebook Review), Jill Lepore’s one-quantity historical past of The us puts reality itself―a devotion to information, proof, and proof―on the middle of the country’s historical past. The American test rests on 3 concepts―“those truths,” Jefferson referred to as them―political equality, herbal rights, and the sovereignty of the folk. However has the country, and democracy itself, introduced on that promise?

These Truths tells this uniquely American tale, starting in 1492, asking whether or not the process occasions over greater than 5 centuries has confirmed the country’s truths, or belied them. To respond to that query, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the patience of inequality, and the character of technological modification. “A country born in contradiction… will struggle, perpetually, over the which means of its historical past,” Lepore writes, However attractive in that combat by means of learning the prior is a part of the paintings of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a Ebook so that they can form our view of American historical past for many years to return.

70 illustrations