...an urgent and pithy book-length essay in which she argues for the viability of the nation. Readers seeking clear and relevant definitions of political concepts will appreciate this brisk yet thorough, frank, and bracing look at the ancient origins of the nation state versus the late-eighteenth-century coinage of the term 'nationalism' and its alignment with exclusion and prejudice ... Lepore writes, placing today’s conflicts in context and calling for us to continue the struggle to deepen and protect American democracy.

Much of the book is devoted to describing how nonwhites and disfavored European immigrant groups in previous generations were excluded by illiberal nationalists both from the polity and from mainstream accounts of American history. Lepore makes this familiar material fresh with her attention to Native American nations. She does a public service by drawing her readers to Frederick Douglass’s 'Composite Nation' address of 1869 ... In contrast, Lepore’s critique of illiberal identity politics is so brief it is easily overlooked ... Her attempt to disentangle good American patriotism from bad American nationalism...tangles American history in knots. Isolationism is nationalist ... But interventionism can be nationalist, too ... Jill Lepore has written a thoughtful and passionate defense of her vision of American patriotism as a purified liberalism. But supporters of American liberal nationalism are unlikely to be persuaded to replace Abraham Lincoln’s belief that America is a nation dedicated to a proposition with the quite different idea that the American nation is nothing but a proposition.

Lepore’s exposition of this contradictory terrain is brisk, equitable, dispassionate, and hair-raising. Any suspicion that she was going to advocate for a kind of upbeat revisionism of the American past is dispelled ... The liberal lens, always focused on the most vulnerable subjects of power, remains purposefully in place ... It’s not only liberals who will find sustenance in Lepore’s book. If you’re an ethno-nationalist, you too could wave around This America in support of your claims. Lepore is aware of this fact—there’s little she isn’t aware of, one senses—and makes it integral to her argument, which is that the age-old struggle between illiberal and liberal tendencies is constitutive of the nation ... Lepore voices coherent reservations about the academic drift from the study of the American nation to the study of a world 'grown global, tied together by intricate webs of trade and accelerating forms of transportation and communication.' To an immigrant like me, however, there is something counterintuitive about the idea that Americans need to focus more than ever on our internal differences. Cultivating at least a basic curiosity about the rest of the world seems to be in order.

... the argument for more national history-writing is often drowned out by the book's condensed history of nationalism in America. And the story Lepore lays out in this short book doesn't exactly inspire patriotism ... In this context, the recent resurgence of nationalism feels like a logical continuation of a strain that's animated United States history since Day 1, rather than the aberration Trump opponents like former Vice President Joe Biden frame it as ... To better understand this land, a reader would be better served by picking up Lepore's ambitious U.S. history, These Truths, rather than this follow-up essay.

While These Truths details the wealth of those contradictions much more extensively, This America spends most of its time discussing a history of immigration restrictions ... isn’t the groundbreaking work that These Truths was, which Lepore acknowledges. It is unlikely to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with her, and those who feel betrayed by the nation’s broken promises may wince at her invocation of patriotism. But Lepore, in sharp and earnest prose, provides a timely reminder that while the nation hasn’t achieved its egalitarian promise – and there’s no guarantee it ever will – the values at its core ensure the existence of a mechanism to fight for it.

Lepore hopes, I think, for a nation in which liberal ideals can be secured without the baggage of cultural solidarity. But this may not work ... These Truths, sometimes reads like a textbook in which the political and intellectual history is left in, and the social and cultural history largely left out ... I’m not sure that this minimalism works. First, she marginalizes the agency of ordinary people, thus missing an opportunity to help citizens understand how they can make change in a democracy (a liberal goal). Second, nation-states are not parliamentary bodies ... in ways that perhaps Lepore does not want to admit, the nation must be more than a debate club.

To force indigenous demands for sovereignty into the frame of US national history, she’s reinterpreted them as internal dissent, as part of a rich debate about how to achieve shared national goals. She’s turned a country containing multiple nations into a single diverse nation. The problem is that seeing the 'struggle for native nationhood' as a bid to help the US nation 'live up to its ideals'—Lepore likens it to the civil rights movement—is to miss the point. Overseas territories are another blind spot, another part of the country that doesn’t fit Lepore’s nation-centered approach ... Lepore’s national frame consistently directs her readers’ gaze inward; it’s the history of a 'we.' She rightly has an inclusive understanding of that 'we,' but she exhibits little interest in anything outside of it ... Driving the demagogues out of the Barnes & Noble will require more than just taking back the nation as an object of serious historical inquiry. Lepore also sees a need to show that object in a more flattering light. Whereas many of her colleagues narrate US history as a tragedy and a chronicle of oppression, Lepore sets out to capture a fuller range of feeling ... Lepore’s relatively upbeat tone is more than a sensibility; it’s a politics ... It it’s hard not to wonder, as the evidence mounts daily that the old rules no longer apply, if the ground that Lepore is digging her heels into isn’t an ice shelf, melting beneath her feet.

A liberalism that fixates on inclusion, moreover, will loathe itself for past exclusions. Just so, the bulk of Ms. Lepore’s book consists of one ugly depredation after another: fascist sympathizers rallying in Madison Square Garden in 1939, Japanese internment camps and so on. Not only is that a one-sided portrayal—surely American nationalism should get some credit for defeating Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany—it makes any sort of patriotism appear horrible and dangerous ... In the end, Ms. Lepore can’t quite say what she wants.

... provocative ... This America helps to identify just what kind of history is being invoked by these actions—and, it points to the history we should be invoking instead ... This America is punchy, shaggy, and pocket-sized. In some ways, This America can be read as a comment on the need for more books like [Lepore's] These Truths, and what we should be doing with them.

...a sharp, short history of nationalism ... The author clearly shows that, while patriotism is characterized by love of your home and people, nationalism features hatred of other countries and immigrants as well as those who are different at home ... A frank, well-written look at the dangers we face. We ignore them at our peril.

...somewhat underdeveloped ... While Lepore’s sense of personal urgency in taking up this topic is clear, the structure here is choppier and more repetitive than in previous works. Readers expecting Lepore’s usual precision and depth in characterizing the historical record will be disappointed.