It addresses the depth and breadth of racial injustice, including the institutional, political, and social mechanisms that intensified inequality, as well as the grassroots activism and legal efforts that emerged to dismantle segregation.

Her chapter on the early years of the Cold War offers a lucid overview of the domestic priorities of the Truman administration, including its efforts to extend and expand upon the promises of the New Deal. This issue came up in some parts of the fourth section of the book, which brings the reader through the period immediately following World War II to the present day. Yet in seeking to explain today’s polarized politics to a general audience, Lepore made choices about what to include and judgements about what mattered that at times obscure or distort aspects of the past that bear on the very political phenomena she hopes to illuminate. There is much here to praise, including the book’s engaging style and discussion of historical trends that sometimes go underappreciated in textbooks and other similar overviews. No work of this scope could capture every important moment or aspect of national history, and Lepore is open about this fact. It is also, much like the American experiment that she chronicles, an imperfect one. It is an ambitious and exciting undertaking. political institutions from 1492 to the present.

politics in the age of Trump, she asks, plaintively, “what, then, is the verdict of history?” Lepore explicitly intends the book to serve as a civics lesson for her readership, to lay bare the inner workings and development of U.S. After speaking to the high ideals of “political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people,” that animate the country’s founding documents, she addresses the halting, contested, and unfinished efforts over the subsequent centuries to realize “those truths” in civic life. Historian Jill Lepore opens her sweeping, synthetic overview of United States history with an explanation of her core goal: to explore how the study of the past might help us assess the successes and failures of the national republican experiment and understand the political divides of our present moment. These Truths: A History of the United States

These truths lepore review