These Truths: A History of the United States

Two hundred fifty years after the United States declared its independence and cast off tyranny, distinguished historian Jill Lepore reconsiders the sweep and direction of American history in this revised edition of her international best-selling book These Truths. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Lepore’s history of America 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. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise?

These Truths 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 wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, the nature of technological change, and now the age of Trump. “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. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.