Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include The Secret History of Wonder Woman, a national bestseller, and Book of Ages, a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history.
Written in elegiac prose, Lepore’s groundbreaking investigation 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. And it rests, too, on a fearless dedication to inquiry, Lepore argues, because self-government depends on it. 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 traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology, from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine, from talk radio to twenty-first-century Internet polls, from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act, from the printing press to Facebook News.
Along the way, Lepore’s sovereign chronicle is filled with arresting sketches of both well-known and lesser-known Americans, from a parade of presidents and a rogues’ gallery of political mischief makers to the intrepid leaders of protest movements, including Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist orator; William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate and ultimately tragic populist; Pauli Murray, the visionary civil rights strategist; and Phyllis Schlafly, the uncredited architect of modern conservatism.
Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. "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. "The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden," These Truths observes. "It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it."
##一部精彩的美国黑历史,如匕首或投枪般犀利。如作者所言有pace (plot driven)和character focused,不是一般历史学家的detached analysis, 因为作者信奉历史是通过证据佐证的故事阐述自己有关过往立论的艺术。
评分##780页个人意志左右的美国国内史。First principle解构美式政治。不及4.5,向下取整到4。
评分 评分 评分##来到1840年代,现代美国大陆的版图基本上就缺和墨西哥接壤的西南面了。那时候美国和墨西哥差不多大,美国人一门心思想要这一片西南面的土地,包括古巴等等(被西班牙怒骂)。首先开始的就是德克萨斯。 1844年2月28日下午,约翰 泰勒总统带着他的国务卿和墨西哥驻美大使和若干名...
评分##好文采 1000多页的美国政治通史在2016年川普当选落下帷幕。4年后的今天,可以检验一下作者作为历史学家的“预言”能力。美国忽略美洲原住民的历史书写,一群白人男人在没有上帝的前提下,写下了一个独立国家对其人民(开始只是有财产的白人)许下的美好愿望-“生而平等”。有不可剥夺...
评分##understood only 60%
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