These Truths: A History of the United States

“Nothing short of a masterpiece.”―NPR Books
A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of the Year

In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades,  award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the  origins and rise of a divided nation.

Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review),  Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America 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. 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 wrestles with the state of  American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of  inequality, and the nature of technological change. “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. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.