These Truths: A History of the United States

These Truths (2018) by historian Jill Lepore is a one-volume chronicle of American history that attempts to tell the United States’ story from beginning to end, something that, as the author notes in the introduction, has not been attempted in a long time. A comparable attempt was made by the British historian and journalist Paul Johnson, who published A History of the American People in 1997. Lepore’s title was inspired by a line from the Declaration of Independence. Lepore, borrowing from one of the nation’s first historians, George Bancroft, sets the nation’s beginning at Christopher Columbus’s accidental “discovery” of what became North America. Lepore describes her work as a political history with the hope that it will be useful to readers “as an old-fashioned civics book” (xviii).

Lepore, the daughter of public school teachers, is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. She is also an instructor at Harvard Law School. Since 2005, Lepore has been a staff writer for the New Yorker, writing mostly about American history. These Truths is the winner of the Council on Foreign Relations’ 2020 Arthur Ross Book Award. Lepore’s other books include The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize; Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (2013), a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction; and her national bestseller, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014), which won the American History Book Prize.

This guide uses the electronic book version of the text.

Plot Summary

The organization of These Truths is chronological. Lepore decidedly marks the United States’ origins within the Age of Discovery—particularly, Genoan explorer Christopher Columbus’s adventures on the island that the native Taíno called “Haiti,” and what Columbus called “Hispaniola,” or “little Spain.” Unlike many previous histories of the United States, Lepore frequently reminds the reader of the nation’s roots in dispossession, enslavement, colonialism, and the act of claiming both territory and authority through writing.

The book is divided into four major parts, each chronicling the nation’s genesis. The main text is bookended by an introduction and an epilogue that examine the feasibility of forming a nation out of three political ideas rooted in Enlightenment-era thought: political equality, natural rights, and the people’s sovereignty. Lepore explores how those ideas have been revisited over the centuries, particularly as the nation faced upheavals over slavery, the Civil War, industrialism, Progressivist reforms, two world wars, the Cold War, periods of economic crises and prosperity, and the election of the first African American president. Lepore also assesses the success so far of the political experiment that is the United States.

The first part, “The Idea (1492-1799),” carries the reader through the era of early settlement to colonial America, when the nation’s foundational principles took root and Americans fought their first battles over territory and political sovereignty.

The second part, “The People (1800-1865),” deals with the rise of Jacksonian Democracy and industrialism, as well as the nation’s moral struggles over the maintenance of slavery, culminating in the Civil War, and its displacement of indigenous peoples as the nation’s border stretched to the end of the continent.

The third part, “The State (1866-1945),” covers Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow at the end of the 19th century, the Progressive Era, and the two world wars, which centralized the United States as a global power and influence.

The fourth part, “The Machine (1946-2016),” chronicles the Cold War’s beginning and end, the consumerism of the 1950s, the civil rights movement, and the rise of the Silent Majority and its creation of a fervent conservative movement whose influence reverberates to date. Lepore also describes the outcome of the 2016 election, which was the result of both decades of political discord and the nefarious influences of both enemies abroad and a tendency within to eschew facts and careful political engagement.

In the Epilogue, Lepore summarizes all of the major historical themes that she details in the book. She returns to the atmosphere of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and describes how much has changed since, for better and worse. She reminds the reader that the results of the American experiment are still inconclusive, and that it will be up to a new generation to steer the course outlined by their ancestors.