New Releases by Jill Lepore

From the best-selling author of These Truths comes We the People, a stunning new history of the U.S. Constitution, for a troubling new era. The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world—and one of the most difficult to amend. At what cost? In this landmark, lavishly illustrated book, Harvard professor of history and law Jill Lepore argues that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. Challenging both originalism and the Supreme Court’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation, Lepore argues that the framers never intended for the Constitution to be kept, like a butterfly, under glass, but instead expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, improving the machinery of government. In an account as radical as Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, Lepore offers a sweeping, lyrical, and democratic constitutional history, telling the stories of generations of Americans who have attempted everything from abolishing the Electoral College to guaranteeing environmental rights, hoping to mend America by amending its constitution.

Messcherp portret van een verdeelde en stuurloze natie Amerika is in het afgelopen decennium ingrijpender veranderd dan in de vijftig jaar daarvoor en staat voor een cruciale fase in zijn geschiedenis. In twintig briljante beschouwingen ontrafelt Jill Lepore de tumultueuze troebelingen waaraan Amerika ten prooi is – in de politiek en daarbuiten: het presidentschap van Donald Trump en de chaos die erop volgde, maar ook andere ontwikkelingen die de Amerikaanse samenleving ontwrichten. De cultuurstrijd, het verschil tussen arm en rijk, het afbrokkelen van de traditionele media, de macht van de Big Tech, de angst voor technologie en de constitutionele crisis rond gender, abortus, wapenbezit, rassenhaat en geweld. Met een scherp oog en een meesterlijke pen geeft Lepore duiding aan een tijdperk van polarisatie en extremisme dat het Amerikaanse politieke landschap voorgoed heeft veranderd.

On January 6, 2021, more than two thousand rioters stormed the doors of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., hoping to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power from former president Donald Trump to his successor, Joseph Biden. The deaths, property damage, and vicious rampage that ensued were witnessed on live television as an unprecedented attack on the democratic process and those who strive to protect it. As an installment of UGA Press’s History in the Headlines series, this book offers a rich discussion between highly respected scholars on the historical backdrop and context for contemporary issues from the headlines. In addition to the historical context, this conversation demonstrates how historians speak to one another about contentious topics and how they contribute in meaningful ways to the public’s understanding of momentous events. This volume focuses on the historical context of the January 6 attack and employs a free-flowing conversation style that allows the historians a more unconventional format. The participants discuss if—and if so, how—historians should engage in public debates and what that engagement means to their roles as academic authorities in the public.

''America''s greatest living essayist . . . Wonderful'' Fintan O''Toole A panoptical vision of modern America, from the brilliant mind of Jill Lepore. The past decade has marked a shift in America''s trajectory. Jill Lepore, the acclaimed writer and New Yorker columnist, has been tracing its contested storylines in real time, beginning with the run-up to Donald Trump''s election, through to the chaos and confusion left in its wake. Here we encounter Americans'' rising techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented - but armed - aimlessness. With the wit and verve that has made her the acclaimed national historian of a generation, these essays reflect on the consuming public fissures of this era: culture wars and the corrosion of the media; disruptive innovation and the future of technology; constitutional crises surrounding gun rights and the racial history behind the very language of insurrection. Balancing a penetrating personal lens with indispensable history, she makes sense of life in a moment of aberration and extremity that has left our political landscape forever changed. The American Beast offers an arresting portrait of America, capturing the tumultuous relationship between the country''s violent past and fractured present.

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.

In de zomer van 1741 braken in New York in korte tijd tien mysterieuze branden uit. Al gauw ging het gerucht dat opstandige slaafgemaakten de stad met de grond gelijk wilden maken. De gealarmeerde slavenhouders, Hollanders vooral, en Engelsen, zetten een meedogenloze strafexpeditie in. Honderden slaafgemaakten werden voor het witte gerecht gesleept. Veertien mensen eindigden op de brandstapel, zeventien aan de galg. In dit meesterlijk geschreven boek reconstrueert Jill Lepore deze dramatische periode – zwarte bladzijden uit zowel het Nederlandse als het Amerikaanse slavernijverleden. Ze laat zien hoe de witte onderdrukking diepgeworteld raakte in het Amerikaanse politieke leven van toen en nu.

Jill Lepores berühmtes, nun endlich auch auf Deutsch vorliegendes Buch ist ein Kabinettstück. Es erzählt die Geschichte von Wonder Woman und dechiffriert zugleich in einer brillanten Spurensuche die darin versteckte Geschichte des Feminismus. So witzig und geistreich hat noch selten jemand Popkultur und Frauenbewegung miteinander verknüpft. Für «Die geheime Geschichte von Wonder Woman» hat Jill Lepore Archive durchforstet, Interviews geführt, Tagebücher gelesen und sich durch Gerichtsprotokolle gearbeitet. Das Ergebnis ist eine rasante Kulturgeschichte, in der ein exzentrischer Psychologe, Erfinder (dem wir auch den Lügendetektor verdanken) und Bigamist, eine aufregende Amazone und die Vorkämpferinnen des amerikanischen Feminismus die Bühne bevölkern. Ebenso unterhaltsam wie scharfsinnig zeigt die renommierte Historikerin, wie die Kämpfe, Hoffnungen und Rückschläge der Frauenrechtsbewegung hineingewoben sind in die Abenteuer einer Superheldin, die nicht nur bösen Fieslingen, sondern auch dem Patriarchat tapfer die Stirn bietet.

Historiadora reconstrói a formação dos Estados Unidos ao longo dos séculos e todas as suas contradições. “Consideramos estas verdades como autoevidentes: que todos os homens são criados iguais, que são dotados por seu Criador de certos direitos inalienáveis, que entre eles estão a vida, a liberdade e a busca da felicidade.” Essas são as palavras de Thomas Jefferson na Declaração de Independência, o documento que estabelece a identidade dos Estados Unidos como nação. Ao longo dos quinhentos anos que se seguiram desde então, o experimento americano baseou-se nos três ideais descritos por Jefferson como “estas verdades”: igualdade política, direitos naturais e soberania do povo. A historiadora e professora de Harvard Jill Lepore abre seu trabalho de reconstrução da história dos Estados Unidos com a citação de Jefferson, mas muito do que há de pior no desenvolvimento dessa nação ― a escravidão e o apreço por esse sistema, os linchamentos públicos, a brutalidade com os povos nativos, a segregação racial ― se evidencia a cada página, desenhando um retrato possivelmente mais fiel do que a premissa democrática, poética, e quiçá utópica, descrita pelo terceiro presidente do país. Estas verdades conta a história americana desde 1492, questionando se o curso dos eventos ao longo desses cinco séculos comprovou as tais premissas fundadoras ou as desmentiu. Em busca destas verdades, a autora traçou o intrincado panorama da política americana do período colonial à máquina partidária do século XIX, dos programas de rádio às pesquisas na internet do século XXI, da Magna Carta ao Ato Patriótico, do jornalismo impresso ao Facebook. Estas verdades em muitos aspectos remodelará a visão da história americana pelas próximas décadas.

From the best-selling author of These Truths, an “exhilarating” (New York Times Book Review) account of the Cold War origins of our data-mad era. The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Although Silicon Valley likes to imagine that it has no past, the scientists of Simulmatics are almost undoubtedly the long-dead ancestors of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—or so argues Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, in this “hilarious, scathing, and sobering” (David Runciman) account of the origins of predictive analytics and behavioral data science.

Deze waarheden is de briljante weerslag van de bewogen geschiedenis van de Verenigde Staten. In fonkelend proza beschrijft Jill Lepore de worsteling van Amerika met haar eigen historie en met de fundamentele waarheden waarop zij als natie is gebouwd: gelijkheid van alle mensen, soevereiniteit, en het recht op leven, vrijheid en het streven naar geluk. Dit boek voorziet die worsteling van historische context. Een erudiete, messcherpe analyse van de Amerikaanse politiek, het recht, de journalistiek, de technologie, de erfenis van de slavernij, de blijvende ongelijkheid. Bekende en onbekende Amerikanen bevolken het relaas: presidenten en schurken, rijken en armoedzaaiers, wetenschappers en kunstenaars – en dragen bij aan Lepore’s meeslepende verhaal.

"Noi riteniamo di per sé evidenti queste verità: che tutti gli uomini sono creati eguali; che essi sono dal Creatore dotati di certi inalienabili diritti, che tra questi diritti sono la Vita, la Libertà, e il perseguimento della Felicità." Le parole di Thomas Jefferson nella Dichiarazione di indipendenza degli Stati Uniti (1776) hanno definito sin dall''inizio agli occhi del mondo le caratteristiche uniche dell''"esperimento americano". In questo magistrale racconto, Jill Lepore ha messo le "verità" di Jefferson al centro della sua indagine su oltre cinque secoli di storia. La narrazione inizia con Cristoforo Colombo, nel 1492, e si conclude nel Paese diviso e tormentato della presidenza Trump. Gli americani di oggi discendono da conquistatori e da conquistati, da schiavi e da proprietari di schiavi, da immigrati e da coloro che hanno combattuto l''immigrazione. "Una nazione contraddittoria sin dalla sua nascita è destinata a discutere per sempre sul senso della propria storia." Perché, in quel giovane Paese votato alla libertà, non tutti erano liberi? Le razze diverse da quella bianca dominante, le donne, le persone omosessuali hanno potuto davvero esercitare i loro "inalienabili diritti"? La democrazia americana ha mantenuto tutte le sue promesse? Le manterrà in futuro? Aneddoti rivelatori su grandi figure e personaggi dimenticati, storie di presidenti e di avventurieri, ritratti di criminali e di idealisti. L''assetto politico e giuridico, il giornalismo e la tecnologia: dalle assemblee delle piccole città coloniali alle grandi macchine elettorali ottocentesche, dalle prime trasmissioni radiofoniche agli ambigui sondaggi su internet. Con questo monumentale quadro di uomini e donne, idee e illusioni, menzogne e verità, Jill Lepore ha creato la prima grande storia degli Stati Uniti d''America per il XXI secolo.

Während die liberalen Demokratien weltweit unter Druck geraten und in den USA Präsident Trump eine zweite Amtszeit anstrebt, legt die gefeierte Historikerin Jill Lepore ein Manifest vor, das dem Rechtspopulismus eine seiner Lieblingsvokabeln streitig macht - die Nation. Die liberalen Eliten, so Lepore, haben die Nation viel zu lange den Rechten überlassen und zahlen dafür nun einen hohen Preis: Der neue Nationalismus von rechts verschlingt den Liberalismus. Es wird Zeit, die Nation zurückzugewinnen. Im Zeitalter der Globalisierung und der kosmopolitischen Eliten schien die Nation ein obsoleter Begriff geworden zu sein: Eine Vokabel, deren Gehalt sich auf dem Weg zur Weltgesellschaft historisch überlebt hatte, eine Parole der Reaktion. Doch in einer Welt, die nach wie vor aus Nationalstaaten besteht, bleibt die Nation der verlässlichste Garant für Recht und Gesetz und das wirkungsvollste Instrument, um die Macht der Vorurteile, Intoleranz und Ungerechtigkeit zu bekämpfen. Das war historisch so, wie die Harvard-Historikerin Jill Lepore am Beispiel der USA zeigt, und das gilt für die Gegenwart. Wer den Liberalismus gegen die autoritäre Welle unserer Zeit verteidigen will, der muss die Nation neu denken - und besser als die falschen Herolde des Nationalismus.

Dit Amerika is een vervolg op Deze waarheden, Jill Lepore''s veelgeprezen geschiedenis van de Verenigde Staten. In een tijd van grote wanhoop over de toekomst van de democratie, is dit boek een vurig pleidooi voor de waarden waarop het land gebouwd is. Nu gevaarlijke vormen van nationalisme in opkomst zijn, verwerpt Lepore het nationalisme door zijn lange geschiedenis uit te leggen, en de geschiedenis van het idee van ''de natie'' zelf. Tegelijkertijd roept ze op tot een ''nieuw Amerikanisme'': een genereus patriottisme dat een eerlijke afrekening met het verleden van de Verenigde Staten vereist. Bron: Flaptekst, uitgeversinformatie.

WELTMACHT AM SCHEIDEWEG - JILL LEPORES BRILLANTE GESCHICHTE AMERIKAS Die Amerikaner stammen von Eroberern und Eroberten, von Menschen die als Sklaven gehalten wurden, und von Menschen die Sklaven hielten, von der Union und von der Konföderation, von Protestanten und von den Juden, von Muslimen und von Katholiken, von Einwanderern und von Menschen, die dafür gekämpft haben, die Einwanderung zu beenden. In der amerikanischen Geschichte ist manchmal - wie in fast allen Nationalgeschichten - der Schurke des einen der Held des anderen. Aber dieses Argument bezieht sich auf die Fragen der Ideologie: Die Vereinigten Staaten sind auf Basis eines Grundbestands von Ideen und Vorstellungen gegründet worden, aber die Amerikaner sind inzwischen so gespalten, dass sie sich nicht mehr darin einig sind, wenn sie es denn jemals waren, welche Ideen und Vorstellungen das sind und waren." Aus der Einleitung In einer Prosa von funkelnder Schönheit erzählt die preisgekrönte Historikerin Jill Lepore die Geschichte der USA von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Sie schildert sie im Spiegel jener «Wahrheiten» (Thomas Jefferson), auf deren Fundament die Nation gegründet wurde: der Ideen von der Gleichheit aller Menschen, ihren naturgegebenen Rechten und der Volkssouveränität. Meisterhaft verknüpft sie dabei das widersprüchliche Ringen um den richtigen Weg Amerikas mit den Menschen, die seine Geschichte gestaltet oder durchlitten haben. Sklaverei und Rassendiskriminierung kommen ebenso zur Sprache wie der Kampf für die Gleichberechtigung der Frauen oder die wachsende Bedeutung der Medien. Jill Lepores große Gesamtdarstellung ist aufregend modern und direkt, eine Geschichte der politischen Kultur, die neue Wege beschreitet und das historische Geschehen geradezu hautnah lebendig werden lässt. Das fulminante Portrait einer Nation Von den Anfängen bis zur heutigen Weltmacht in der Krise "Jeder, der sich für die Zukunft Amerikas interessiert, muss dieses Buch lesen. Lepore macht alles lebendig, das Gute, das Schlechte, das Schöne und das Hässliche". Lynn Hunt

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection One of President Bill Clinton’s “Best Things I’ve Read This Year” 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.

“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year 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. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume 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, and the nature of technological change. “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.

A história secreta da maior super-heroína de todos os tempos “Com cem vezes a capacidade e a força dos nossos melhores atletas homens e mais fortes lutadores, ela aparece do nada para vingar injustiças ou corrigir as maldades! Bela como Afrodite; sagaz como Atena; dotada da velocidade de Mercúrio e da força de Hércules — nós a conhecemos como Mulher-Maravilha. Mas quem pode nos dizer quem ela é ou de onde veio?” Apresentada assim, a heroína surgiu nos quadrinhos da All Star Comics no 8, atual DC Comics, em 1941, nos Estados Unidos. Criada por William Moulton Marston, a Mulher-Maravilha é a super-heroína mais famosa de todos os tempos. Mas o que pouca gente sabe é que sua origem remonta à história do feminismo nos Estados Unidos. Neste livro, a historiadora de Harvard e redatora da revista New Yorker Jill Lepore refaz a trajetória da personagem, mostrando como o movimento sufragista e feminista influenciou na redação das histórias. Em uma pesquisa fantástica o leitor terá acesso à origem dessa que é uma das mais importantes super-heroínas da cultura ocidental, Uma surpreendente trama familiar, fatos cruciais para o feminismo do século XXI e a Mulher-Maravilha como você nunca viu!

From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the missing longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called “The Oral History of Our Time.” Joe Gould’s Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that “The Oral History of Our Time” did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould’s own diaries and notebooks—including volumes of his lost manuscript—Lepore argues that Joe Gould’s real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernists’ relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gould’s terrifying obsession with the African American sculptor Augusta Savage. In ways that even Gould himself could not have imagined, what Gould wrote down really is a history of our time: unsettling and ferocious.

La guerre du Roi Philip dévasta les colonies anglaises de la côte est de l’Amérique entre 1675 et 1676. Colons puritains et Indiens Algonquins s’y affrontèrent avec une violence inouïe. Après avoir manqué de disparaître, les colons finirent par l’emporter. Outrancièrement : au-delà de leur victoire par les armes, ils furent seuls à coucher cette guerre par écrit, à l’imprimer, à en publier la mémoire pour les siècles à venir – à lui donner ce nom. Avec un art consommé de la narration, Jill Lepore opère une plongée dans le monde brutal de cette époque, où le sang et l’encre coulaient d’un même élan pour engloutir les autochtones dans l’oubli ; prolongeant son enquête jusqu’au XXe siècle, elle expose de surcroît par quels détours cette guerre implacable fut instituée comme un moment fondateur de l’identité américaine. Méditation suggestive sur la guerre parmi les hommes et réflexion sur l’histoire que l’on en fait, Le Nom de la guerre est une réussite rare : un livre d’histoire totale.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Within the origin of one of the world’s most iconic superheroes hides a fascinating family story—and a crucial history of feminism in the twentieth-century. “Everything you might want in a page-turner…skeletons in the closet, a believe-it-or-not weirdness in its biographical details, and something else that secretly powers even the most “serious” feminist history—fun.” —Entertainment Weekly The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Jill Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights—a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later. Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston. The Marston family story is a tale of drama, intrigue, and irony. In the 1920s, Marston and his wife brought into their home Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century. Even while celebrating conventional family life in a regular column that Marston and Byrne wrote for Family Circle, they themselves pursued lives of extraordinary nonconformity. Marston, internationally known as an expert on truth—he invented the lie detector test—lived a life of secrets, only to spill them on the pages of Wonder Woman. Includes a new afterword with fresh revelations based on never before seen letters and photographs from the Marston family’s papers, and 161 illustrations and 16 pages in full color.

Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has written a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave. How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can do is ask,” Lepore writes. “That’s why any history of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history of curiosity.” Lepore starts that history with the story of a seventeenth-century Englishman who had the idea that all life begins with an egg, and ends it with an American who, in the 1970s, began freezing the dead. In between, life got longer, the stages of life multiplied, and matters of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences. Lately, debates about life and death have determined the course of American politics. Each of these debates has a history. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life—from board games to breast pumps—Lepore argues that the age of discovery, Darwin, and the Space Age turned ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy. “New worlds were found,” she writes, and “old paradises were lost.” As much a meditation on the present as an excavation of the past, The Mansion of Happiness is delightful, learned, and altogether beguiling.

A revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin''s youngest sister and a wholly different account of the founding of the United States.

From celebrated writer Jill Lepore, a literary and political history of American origin stories In The Story of America, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories—from John Smith''s account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama''s 2009 inaugural address—to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type. Part civics primer, part cultural history, The Story of America excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary. Along the way it presents fresh readings of Benjamin Franklin''s Way to Wealth, Thomas Paine''s Common Sense, "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, and "Paul Revere''s Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as histories of lesser-known genres, including biographies of presidents, novels of immigrants, and accounts of the Depression. From past to present, Lepore argues, Americans have wrestled with the idea of democracy by telling stories. In this thoughtful and provocative book, Lepore offers at once a history of origin stories and a meditation on storytelling itself.

From acclaimed bestselling historian Jill Lepore, the story of the American historical mythology embraced by the far right Americans have always put the past to political ends. The Union laid claim to the Revolution—so did the Confederacy. Civil rights leaders said they were the true sons of liberty—so did Southern segregationists. This book tells the story of the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of the nation''s founding, including the battle waged by the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to "take back America." Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, offers a careful and concerned look at American history according to the far right, from the "rant heard round the world," which launched the Tea Party, to the Texas School Board''s adoption of a social-studies curriculum that teaches that the United States was established as a Christian nation. Along the way, she provides rare insight into the eighteenth-century struggle for independencea history of the Revolution, from the archives. Lepore traces the roots of the far right''s reactionary history to the bicentennial in the 1970s, when no one could agree on what story a divided nation should tell about its unruly beginnings. Behind the Tea Party''s Revolution, she argues, lies a nostalgic and even heartbreaking yearning for an imagined past—a time less troubled by ambiguity, strife, and uncertainty—a yearning for an America that never was. The Whites of Their Eyes reveals that the far right has embraced a narrative about America''s founding that is not only a fable but is also, finally, a variety of fundamentalism—anti-intellectual, antihistorical, and dangerously antipluralist. In a new afterword, Lepore addresses both the recent shift in Tea Party rhetoric from the Revolution to the Constitution and the diminished role of scholars as political commentators over the last half century of public debate.

BANCROFF PRIZE WINNER • King Philip''s War, the excruciating racial war—colonists against Indigenous peoples—that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war." The war''s brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Lepore makes clear that it was after the war—and because of it—that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid ones. King Philip''s War became one of the most written-about wars in our history, and Lepore argues that the words strengthened and hardened feelings that, in turn, strengthened and hardened the enmity between Indigenous peoples and Anglos. Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important in their effect on our history as were the events themselves.

BONUS: This edition contains a Blindspot discussion guide. Stewart Jameson, a Scottish portrait painter fleeing his debtors in Edinburgh, has washed up on the British Empire''s far shores—in the city of Boston, lately seized with the spirit of liberty. Eager to begin anew, he advertises for an apprentice, but the lad who comes knocking is no lad at all. Fanny Easton is a fallen woman from Boston''s most prominent family who has disguised herself as a boy to become Jameson''s defiant and seductive apprentice. Written with wit and exuberance by accomplished historians, Blindspot is an affectionate send-up of the best of eighteenth-century fiction. It celebrates the art of the Enlightenment and the passion of the American Revolution by telling stories of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary time.

What ties Americans to one another? What unifies a nation of citizens with different racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds? These were the dilemmas faced by Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they sought ways to bind the newly United States together. In A is for American, award-winning historian Jill Lepore portrays seven men who turned to language to help shape a new nation’s character and boundaries. From Noah Webster’s attempts to standardize American spelling, to Alexander Graham Bell’s use of “Visible Speech” to help teach the deaf to talk, to Sequoyah’s development of a Cherokee syllabary as a means of preserving his people’s independence, these stories form a compelling portrait of a developing nation’s struggles. Lepore brilliantly explores the personalities, work, and influence of these figures, seven men driven by radically different aims and temperaments. Through these superbly told stories, she chronicles the challenges faced by a young country trying to unify its diverse people.

Pulitzer Prize Finalist and Anisfield-Wolf Award Winner In New York Burning, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore recounts these dramatic events of 1741, when ten fires blazed across Manhattan and panicked whites suspecting it to be the work a slave uprising went on a rampage. In the end, thirteen black men were burned at the stake, seventeen were hanged and more than one hundred black men and women were thrown into a dungeon beneath City Hall. Even back in the seventeenth century, the city was a rich mosaic of cultures, communities and colors, with slaves making up a full one-fifth of the population. Exploring the political and social climate of the times, Lepore dramatically shows how, in a city rife with state intrigue and terror, the threat of black rebellion united the white political pluralities in a frenzy of racial fear and violence.