Book Review: Jill Lepore's "These Truths"

What is America? Who is America, what do Americans believe in, and how does one define an American way of life? The answer to these questions go beyond America's demarcation on a map as one of 194 recognized nation-states around the world, a republic of 325 million people, composed of some 50 states and five territorial outposts. Author and professor of history Jill Lepore is one of many in a long line of scholars that attempts to answer these difficult questions by way of an ambitious 932-page volume of America's history, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). Here, the epic saga of American history is explored not just by the time-honored practice of rote chronological recitation of major events, but also by the examination of their ideological and philosophical underpinnings, forces and debates that continue to drive the complicated and ever-evolving American experiment forward.

To understand where we are today, Lepore takes us way back to the 16th century to show that, above all, we are a country of contradictions, and have been from the beginning. A nation that started from the chaos of revolution naturally will have its fits and starts. In an age of postmodernism, where truths seem few and far between or up to interpretation, Lepore begins her examination by asking if American history has lived up to its lofty ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution (i.e. America's "truths").

From the time of Columbus landing in the Bahamas to the colonial era, European colonizers and explorers brought their ideas of "equality, sovereignty, and consent" (see the Magna Carta, for example) with them (Lepore, 2018, p. 787). Despite believing in these higher-truths, they did not necessarily apply them to the Native Americans they encountered, who appeared backwards to them in their darker skins, practice of pagan religions, and seeming inability to cultivate (read: build/develop/own) their lands in the ways of modern societies. These were not necessarily new ideas, as the conquerors, in their debates over what they were doing in the New World was right, dug up Aristotle, who believed in a natural hierarchy, where some were born into slavery and others into the ruling classes. Stable societies needed hierarchies, that's just how it is.

Those precedents seemed like biological truths rather than the products of sociopolitical realities and would serve, for a time, to sustain certain oppressions in the United States alongside almost utopian conditions of freedom and equality in governance.

"A nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history." (Lepore, 2018, p. 786)    

So when the United States of America was established out of a bloody severance from Great Britain in the name of freedom and liberty, there were many groups of people left out of the promises of a truly democratic society, namely Native Americans, African Americans, women, poor and non-propertied white men (later on, immigrants and the LGBTQ community would be slighted as well in this regard and would agitate to secure their rights). These resulting frictions built up plenty of strain in the sociopolitical tectonics of the nation, with releases coming often as reactionary calamities and a halt or backwards regression of the expansion of equal rights, before another generation would come along and realize the error of its forebears and make corrections.

Add a new technological revolution with both the potential of unity and division among a growing electorate. Shake. Rinse, repeat. As a result of this turbulent national environment, both conservatives and liberals have taken turns being either the champions of or opposing reactionaries to reforms such as emancipating the slaves (result: the Civil War) to the regulation of labor conditions, legislation of civil rights, and equal rights for women. The echoes of these fights remain with us today, giving us such partisan philosophies as identity politics and creeds of law and order that threaten to undermine the continued fights for the realization of true equality.

In the end, Lepore spares no one in her critiques of the past, showing how peoples of all political persuasions are complicit in either the nation's successes or failures, and that ultimately, the nation is better off for having brought in more of its people underneath the big tent of citizenship (and all of its accompanying obligations). She pushes for continued improvement of the American experiment, taking pride in its successes and asking us to learn from our past grievous errors. Because of the ongoing nature of our national experiment, an epic tale Lepore tells with elegance, no definitive conclusion can be reached on whether or not our nation has, in fact, realized its fundamental truths for all of its citizens. Of course, this means that there is more work to be done, a new generation that needs to wrestle with its history and take the nation into the future.


Works Cited:

Lepore, Jill. (2018). These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.