It isn’t until you start reading it that you realize how much we need a book like this one at this particular moment ... It tries to take in almost everything, an impossible task, but I’d be hard-pressed to think she could have crammed more into these 932 highly readable pages ... It’s a big sweeping book, a way for us to take stock at this point in the journey, to look back, to remind us who we are and to point to where we’re headed. This is not an account of relentless progress. It’s much subtler and darker than that. It reminds us of some simple facts so much in the foreground that we must revisit them ... Lepore panders a little to liberal sensibilities ... But she is withering about the New Left, and liberalism’s turn toward elitism and identity politics. And she highlights truths that are usually dim-lit ... This is not an account conservatives will hate. She’s brilliant at times ... Lepore is also a writer. This book is aimed at a mass audience, driven by anecdote and statistic, memoir and photograph, with all the giants of American history in their respective places. There wasn’t a moment when I struggled to keep reading ... There are moments, however, when you wince at the purple prose ... But these are quibbles. We need this book. Its reach is long, its narrative fresh and the arc of its account sobering to say the least. This is not Whig history. It is a classic tale of a unique country’s astonishing rise and just-as-inevitable fall.
She scours the archives for fresh insights on topics other historians thought were tapped. Her writing is gutsy, lyrical and expressive ... Ranging from European settlement to Trumpian tweets, These Truths is a perceptive and necessary contribution to understanding the American condition of late. History in Lepore’s nimble hands is more than the telling of tales. It is probed and analyzed and dislodged from the past, presented as a force that resonates in the present ... She presents an honest history, one that searches for evidence and answers ... Some historians shy from presenting the American experience as the story of progress. Lepore seems not so bashful. For nearly every low point in the nation’s undulating past there followed an upswing, often involving a hero, although frequently someone other than the traditional star-spangled savior ... It captures the fullness of the past, where hope rises out of despair, renewal out of destruction, and forward momentum out of setbacks. Lepore points vividly to the true source of American exceptionalism, people who step from the pages and reaffirm your love of country.
These Truths replicates the same troubling 'vanishing' that Lepore critiques in 19th-century novelist James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Indigenous absences are not a minor fault with These Truths. They lie at its core and they bear weighty consequences for the story that emerges ... in many respects, like its consideration of the protracted struggle for racial equality, it poses a timely rejoinder to airport best sellers trafficking in whitewashed tales of Founding Fathers and military generals. But the narrative Lepore constructs relies on the eventual exit of indigenous actors to make way for other dramas ... Had Lepore substantively engaged non-textual knowledge systems and cross-cultural translation, she might have impressed upon readers a genuinely transformative approach to the wide-ranging means by which diverse historical experiences can be accessed ... These Truths underestimates readers’ capacities to deal with historical complexity and the nuanced ways that indigenous experiences trouble convenient story lines about America’s most iconic moments ... These Truths provides readers with few satisfying analyses of the underlying structures, ideologies, and processes that animated American movement into native homelands and attendant dispossessions ... Lepore is certainly no defender of neatly triumphalist American histories. She takes some pains to underscore tactics and subversions by which Euro-Americans took over native homelands ... But when a text repeatedly curtails histories in ways that play up indigenous repression, it fosters a partial view, at best ... These Truths is a missed opportunity on many levels.
Her one-volume history is elegant, readable, sobering; it extends a steadying hand when a breakneck news cycle lurches from one event to another, confounding minds and churning stomachs ... The size of the project is liberating and constraining at once ... But in Lepore’s hands, the history gets some room to breathe ... her book is less about a struggle between heroes and villains than it is about the country’s often tortured approach to political equality and natural rights—truths that were supposed to be self-evident but have been treated as if they were anything but ... Few, if any, politicians come out of Lepore’s account looking pristine, though she casts some as more calculating and opportunistic than others ... Lepore is at her most formidable when she’s marshaling historical evidence. Some of her more literary flourishes read like good intentions gone awry ... This cleareyed history had done its civic duty: It primed me to miss the Lepore who tells it like it is.
... a piquant, provocative and dazzling history of America. Like Thomas Paine, she writes with fury, flash, and flourish ... As she generalizes, Ms. Lepore sometimes gets ahead of her skis ... Far more often, however, Ms. Lepore’s analysis, which is grounded in dissatisfaction with liberalism as well as conservatism, is compelling ... Most compelling is Ms. Lepore’s documentation of conflicts over truth throughout U.S. history.
Historians are often cheerleaders or critics, but Lepore is less like Herodotus or Howard Zinn, and more like Hercule Poirot: sorting out what happened, but also why and how ... In These Truths there are no heroes or villains, only Americans. But the book is more than a collection of profiles in chronological order; Lepore considers ideas as much as individuals ... Jill Lepore is at her best when she is describing what has happened, not prescribing what should; the book’s weakest pages are the final ones, where she lapses into prediction, and gets lost in a strained metaphor about the ship of state righting itself. But the first step in self-help is to know thyself, and Lepore can certainly help with that. She has assembled evidence of an America that was better than some thought, worse than almost anyone imagined, and weirder than most serious history books ever convey. Armed with the facts of what happened before, we are better able to approach our collective task of figuring out what should happen now.
... Some shakiness about elementary facts, especially on politics, recurs in later chapters ... [In its exploration of Andrew Jackson's politics, the book] signals Lepore’s interest in showing how some of Trumpism’s origins emerged long before Trump’s presidency, a course she pursues with uneven success ... Lepore’s interpretation focuses on the intersection of culture and politics, but overall, while persuasive on culture, it is much less so on politics. Although politics remains at the core of her book, Lepore is most at home discussing cultural artifacts and trends ... Lepore gets back on track when she shifts to the history of the mass media and political polling, and their undermining of deliberative democracy ... Lepore does not offer a final verdict on America and its truths, but her concluding lines are anguished, depicting a ship of state being torched by those newly in charge and the craven opposition huddled clueless below decks, with a new generation of Americans called upon 'to forge an anchor in the glowing fire of their ideals,' yet in need of 'an ancient and nearly forgotten art: how to navigate by the stars.'
...has America lived up to the ideas of the founders of this country, many of whom failed to heed their own words in the first place? That's the question that forms the basis of Lepore's magnificent book ... She has chosen to look at America through the lens of the lens of the promises America has made to itself, and whether we've kept them ... Lepore is scrupulously fair, writing about the country with neither easy cynicism or unearned sunniness, but her writing is often at its best when she betrays anger and disappointment in our country's past ... crucially, she often turns her sights on names that don't often appear in school textbooks ... Jill Lepore is an extraordinarily gifted writer, and These Truths is nothing short of a masterpiece of American history.
Though Lepore’s survey ranges widely—and is especially revealing about the manipulation of public opinion—slavery ('America’s Achilles’ heel') is at the heart of her saga. Lepore mines fascinating details about the slaves who worked for the founders. Such tales, while eye-opening, are dispiriting. And yet, Lepore makes clear: The achievement of the founders was remarkable in light of most of humankind’s history, where power had usually changed hands by force or coercion ... Lepore is gloomy about the present day. She clearly worries that populist demagogues and 'cyberutopians' will push the country in the wrong direction. But I read her book as showing why America is resilient enough to withstand Donald Trump and the disrupters of Silicon Valley, or far worse. My one quibble is that she shortchanges American economic dynamism ... It is...the sort of book that would make college students (and their parents) want to read history and to learn why it matters.
... absorbing ... At more than 900 pages, this is a big book. But it’s a big subject, and Lepore is as graceful and witty a writer as anyone who has tackled it. Chapter after chapter, she offers new ways to think about familiar topics ... To be sure, the book tilts liberal. But Lepore is nowhere close to being predictable in her judgments.
[Lepore] tells this dual story splendidly in her new book, These Truths ... deftly crafted ... Few writers in this country produce narratives about the past as insightful, concise, or witty as those that Lepore seems to turn out ... Lepore establishes the influences of technology on American ideals, but she has less time for the diverse flavors of political religiosity—egalitarian or otherwise ... Even secular historians who may wish that were not true should realize that attention must be paid ... Lepore begins her book by rejecting the urge to moralize, but she cannot resist making stern judgments near the end of it about the troubling, crude politics of the present ... Lepore is at her best when she illuminates these conflicts in both thought and action.
Lepore writes about...ongoing struggle with an eloquence and concision that’s belied by her book’s large size. She charts the seismic changes in American life, as urbanization took hold and changed the face of the working world (in 1880, she notes, less than five percent of the country’s workforce was clerical, whereas by 1920 there were millions of clerks in America, and half of them were women); through court cases and street marches and presidential campaigns, she follows the often torturously slow progress made toward the self-evident truth of equality. And she makes it all intensely dramatic reading as no author has done since Hugh Brogan’s Longman History of the United States of America back in 1985. It’s an unsettling, thoroughly amazing performance ... it’s virtually impossible not to feel something of both Lepore’s quiet, almost defiant optimism and something of the historian’s long view of time’s slow currents. These Truths deftly includes its readers in the history they’re reading, reminding them of the perspective that’s the only sure guarantee against either triumphalism or excoriation.
Lepore’s brilliant book, These Truths, rings as clear as a church bell, the lucid, welcome yield of clear thinking and a capable, curious mind ... Lepore, a specialist in Early American history, is in her element in the first quarter of These Truths, zestfully documenting complexity and contradiction amid a welter of citizens. Her history brims, much more so than, say, the one David McCullough depicts in 1776 ... her chewy quotations mesmerize ... steadily, she weighs U.S. history through the fulcrum of racism—what is suppressed in many accounts animates These Truths ... But These Truths makes a beautiful case for abiding.
[Lepore] has drawn on her books and articles for the present work, which is strongest where it overlaps the ground she has previously covered. Her delightful book on Jane Franklin and her brother Benjamin provides a wealth of material for her coverage here of the colonial and early national eras. Her book on slavery in New York sets the template for something her current book does better than any other comprehensive history of the United States: writing the lives of slaves into the story of the republic ... But any reader who expects a primer on America’s political evolution is going to be at a loss at times. Lepore admits to paying little attention to military history, yet the short shrift she gives to the Civil War, as an episode in American political history even apart from the battles, is going to leave uninitiated readers mystified as to why that conflict still roils the nation. She covers World War I in hardly more space ... The inevitable errors in a work as ambitious as this are mostly minor ... Lepore generally lets her story tell itself. Where she renders judgments, they are usually sound ... Those devoted to an honest reckoning with America’s past have their work cut out for them. Lepore’s book is a good place to start.
This is a major work: deeply detailed, bristling with thought and ideas, and constructed of many intertwining narratives and finely realized characters ... Lepore’s gifts as a storyteller make for accessible reading ... History may not offer a way out, but Lepore’s history tells us how we got here.
A nine-hundred-plus-page tome, [These Truths] is a full history of the United States ... Lepore’s book—which over its first half or so mentions slavery and free black people on almost every page—is full of people like [Benjamin] Lay, who didn’t sit idly by as human beings were treated like property. It is full of statements by men like Jefferson, who saw the horror of the institution and yet refused to end it for his own comfort and monetary gain ... as I read These Truths, I realized again how important it is to search for the truth ... Lepore doesn’t give us any answers [to questions about how to fix the country's relationships with marginalized groups], though she does appear to be unfortunately impatient with millennials’ insistence that language—how people are spoken about, joked about, belittled—matters.
Providing historical context for national events, Lepore...delivers a sweeping, balanced, and finely wrought narrative history of the United States. The vaulting ambition of the book is matched by the elegance and dry wit of Lepore's writing and careful rigor of her scholarship. She expertly marshals incidents, statistics, and analysis, resulting in a chronicle at once panoramic and richly detailed—like a giant medieval tapestry ... This thought-provoking and fascinating book stands to become the definitive one-volume U.S. history for a new generation.
... clear in purpose and elegant in design, although at almost 800 pages it tests any reader’s patience ... organization conveys Lepore’s signature strength as a writer, which is the capacity to distil complex arguments ... doubles as 'an old fashioned civics book', as Lepore herself says. But a civics book is not the most interesting model for history-writing, whatever its utility. The framework of ideals and their betrayal holds the pieces together, but in an increasingly predictable way...There is surprisingly little Native American history...Instead it is African American history that provides the scaffolding ...But however much she owes to them, her history of the United States is strikingly devoid of a critique of the racial capitalism and liberalism their positions involved ... For all the wide-ranging knowledge on display in These Truths, Lepore’s consistent lack of interest in matters of political economy is telling. Slavery is a moral outrage but not a system of labour exploitation or capital accumulation. There is liberalism and democracy, illiberalism and white nationalism, but there is no capitalism in either equation. There are foundational American ideals and there is a history of lapses or failures or exclusions or omissions. But there is no structural relationship between the two ... The first half of the book has such a delightful richness of detail and cast of characters that the set pieces merge seamlessly with the rest ... For all its length and detail what These Truths offers is quite transparently a history of the present, a prehistory of now.
Throughout this journey from Columbus to the present, Lepore consistently stresses the often-anguishing contradictions between the ideals and realities of American life ... But this is not a one-sided carping over national sins. Using a series of beautifully written vignettes, Lepore captures the nobility of the individuals and various movements that fought to narrow the gap between principles and everyday life. Of course, generally speaking, people don’t live their lives as if they are part of a moral struggle or social experiment. Still, in the age of Trump, in which many long-accepted verities seem to be crumbling, Lepore’s far-reaching interpretative history demands serious consideration.
In this mammoth, wonderfully readable history of the United States from Columbus to Trump, the author relies on primary sources to 'let the dead speak for themselves,' creating an enthralling, often dramatic narrative of the American political experiment ... Always with style and intelligence, Lepore weaves stories of immigrants and minorities, creates moving scenes (Margaret Fuller’s death in a storm off New York City), and describes the importance of photography and printed newspapers in the lives of a divided people now 'cast adrift on the ocean of the Internet.' A splendid rendering—filled with triumph, tragedy, and hope—that will please Lepore’s readers immensely and win her many new ones.
