jill lepore website

For this interview, he spoke with Jill Lepore about her new book The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Knopf, 2014). magazine_button_bg_color_328549 = '#ffcf0d'; A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her many books include the international bestseller These Truths and This America. “Whether nations can remain liberal,” she counsels, “actually depends on the recovery of the many ways of understanding what it means to belong to a nation, and even to love a nation, the place, the people, and the idea itself.”. David Marcus. In The Last Archive, acclaimed historian Jill Lepore traces the history of evidence, proof, and knowledge, in troubled epistemological times. This America: The Case for the NationBy Jill Lepore A Harvard professor, she won the Bancroft Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the field, for her first book, The Name of War. ), coauthored with Martin Dugard, offers national history in its familiar Father’s Day form, just with more gore and less accuracy. His wildly popular Killing series (Killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy, Killing Reagan, etc. The Korean War, which didn’t, she barely mentions, even though it permanently divided the Korean Peninsula and may have taken as many Asian lives as the Vietnam War did. She’s also a long-time fan of all manner of radio plays, and a particular devotee of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre on the Air. It had shaped the country’s past, and it might well shape its future. “After fourteen people were killed in a terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in San Bernardino, California,” she writes, “the alt-left spent its energies in the aftermath of this tragedy attacking one another for breaches of the rules of ‘intersectionality,’ which involve intricate, identity-based hierarchies of suffering and virtue.” Twitter users, she continues, responded to the news by angrily correcting newscasters who described the attack as the worst massacre in US history (that would be Wounded Knee, they insisted) and arguing about whether it was ableist to blame the shooting on mental illness. Don’t Buy It. For many readers, it appeared that the mask had finally slipped, that history had been revealed as a violent struggle between the elites and the masses. IF THEN is simultaneously gripping and absolutely terrifying’ – Amanda Foreman ‘Jill Lepore is the pre-eminent historian of forgotten tales from America’s past that throw startling light on the present. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the host of the podcast, The Last Archive. Rumaan Alam magazine_button_text_328549 = ''; By using this website, you consent to our use of cookies. She is fascinated by political discourse, questions of inclusion, and communication technologies, yet it is only with her follow-up book—a short volume bearing the (similarly bland) title This America—that we clearly see how they connect. This week in our department’s Intro to History course, we’re talking about history as a form of literature.Wanting to point students to some of my favorite writing historians, I started with Jill Lepore, the Harvard professor who also writes regular essays for The New Yorker.. (“All historians are coroners,” she began a 2019 piece on inheriting a laptop from a dead friend. The Republican candidate used Carmichael’s speech as a wedge issue and won the election handily, triumphing in 55 out of California’s 58 counties. if( magazine_text_328549 !='' ){ } Log out? A winner of the Bancroft Prize, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Magazine Award, and, twice, for the Pulitzer Prize. Monday, September 24, 2018. Lepore’s relatively upbeat tone is more than a sensibility; it’s a politics. Jill Lepore, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of fourteen books, including “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.” What is most impressive is that, in this white heat of research and writing, her work has been, well, conspicuously and reliably good. The Trump presidency and the climate crisis have raised sharp challenges to her worldview. Jill Lepore, a professor of American history, in her office in Robinson Hall. With this monumental picture of men and women, ideas and illusions, lies and truths, Jill Lepore created the first great history of the United States of America for the 21st century. This is the second installment of Booked, a new series of Q&As with authors by Dissent contributor Timothy Shenk. You can read our Privacy Policy here. tn_pos: 'rectangle_1', The second change that has fractured national narratives—globalization—is a more complicated story. magazine_button_url_328549 = 'https://www.thenation.com/email-signup-module-donate/'; Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. The last 10 winners whose ages I could determine won the Bancroft, on average, in their late 50s; Lepore won it at 33 and has been virtually unstoppable ever since. Overseas territories are another blind spot, another part of the country that doesn’t fit Lepore’s nation-centered approach. After These Truths appeared, historian Christine DeLucia and other critics noticed that Lepore had made little room in her story for Native Americans, especially in the latter half. (She writes that George Washington attended the Constitutional Convention wearing “dentures made from ivory and from nine teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.”) Yet her faith is dauntless. Current Issue She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker and host of the podcast, The Last Archive.Her many books include, These Truths: A History of the United States, an international bestseller and one of Time magazines's top ten non-fiction books of the decade.. Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. In the new book, Lepore shows her hand, revealing the political commitments that impelled her to write These Truths and that shape her worldview and approach to history. She finds herself in the awkward position of espousing patriotism at a moment of cruel nationalism, of explaining why radicalism doesn’t work at just the time radicals on all sides are gaining clout, and of insisting that the nation is the most relevant geographical unit while storms, droughts, and heat waves make a mockery of political borders. Lepore’s devotion to the country’s core values is a major part of This America. Global solidarities and widened horizons are fine to contemplate, but there’s a reason that books about the nation sell best. Yet reading Lepore’s rendition of it, in which the tragedy of slavery cries out with an almost unbearable poignancy, is like watching a virtuoso pianist set to work on the “Moonlight” Sonata. This brilliant book illuminates the future too. p: (617) 495-3562. They challenge the nation to live up to its ideals.” This is fine as far as it goes, but notice what she has done in making such an assertion: 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. . Jill Lepore’s Slanted Truths. “Engaging. These truths endure. slotId: "thenation_article_indent", Lepore recognizes diversity within those boundary lines—the nation contains many kinds and colors—but she nevertheless consistently interprets that diversity as part of a shared national heritage. It is, she writes, an argument for “the enduring importance of the United States and of American civic ideals.” Those words may sound tepid, but they are, for Lepore, a declaration of a multifront war. David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History Harvard College Professor. There is something admirably inclusive about Lepore’s vision of the country as a diverse nation, but there is something restricting about it, too. What should we call it? Yet from reading This America, it’s easy to see why indigenous peoples initially played a small role in her story. I have. magazine_button_bg_color_328549 = '#dd3333'; . Lepore writes ably and critically about the George W. Bush administration’s Global War on Terrorism, yet she is more concerned with how the use of torture violated long-​standing norms and tarnished national morals than she is with the far more consequential destabilization of the Middle East. More info. Lepore quotes him when describing the sharpening of political knives that has been ongoing since the Reagan administration: The 2016 election “nearly rent the nation in two,” she writes. 20th Century. } JILL LEPORE: It is a commitment of a certain kind of technologist to ignore the past. Daniel ImmerwahrDaniel Immerwahr is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University. “The nation has been coming apart.” One horseman of the apocalypse is the right-wing radio host Alex Jones, who consumes so much of her attention that a reader unfamiliar with history might conclude from These Truths that his arrival in politics was more momentous than the Korean War. if( magazine_button_bg_color_328549 !='' ){ freestar.config.enabled_slots.push({ “We cannot have the university campus used as a base from which to foment riots,” Reagan declared. For a radical, this is not the time to mend rifts or make compromises. 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. Zadie Smith’s Turn to Short Fiction ... Jill Lepore. Here’s Why. placementName: "thenation_article_indent", Historians today are relentless pluralizers, far more inclined to write the histories of modernities than the history of modernity. Stark conflict has been essential to progress, and the times of greatest national division—the 1860s, the 1960s and ’70s—have also been times of major progressive victories like the abolition of slavery and the establishment of reproductive rights. But Jill Lepore makes clear that it was after the war--and because of it--that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid ones. These Truths: A History of the United States is a book of American history by historian Jill Lepore.It traces histories of American politics, law, society, and technology from the Age of Discovery through the present day. The Bill O’Reillys of the bookshelf, she insists in This America, have not only taken control of the national story but also claimed for themselves the mantle of patriotism. Stanford University’s Sam Wineburg, an expert on history education, says that it “has arguably had a greater influence on how Americans understand their past than any other single book.”. Her dozen books include These Truths: A History of the United States, cited as “nothing short of a masterpiece” by NPR, and, out this fall, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. 17th & 18th Centuries. True patriots, those who cherish the liberal values of the country, must stand and be counted. For her, the United States has professed democratic equality from the start. targeting:{ There are still one-volume histories being written but not, by and large, by scholars who profess a lifelong expertise in the subject. Calendar. This America announces its intentions on the very first page. These Truths was published by W. W. Norton in September 2018. Living with porous borders has led historians to recognize that the past isn’t served up neatly in national containers. If it’s a better society today, this is because activists made seemingly unrealistic demands and fought for them. And by taking both Harry Washington and George Washington seriously at the same time, she compellingly demonstrates that writing an inclusive history needn’t require splitting the past into separate histories “divided by race, sex, or class,” as Lepore contends many of her colleagues do. More info. 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. slotId: "thenation_right_rail_328549", When Carmichael received an invitation in 1966 to speak at the University of California, Berkeley, a California gubernatorial candidate named Ronald Reagan seized on it as a chance to bolster his own campaign. Against the “postmodernism” that she says has “suffused” politics—a Fox News right crying “fake news” and a millennial left that, she claims, locates epistemic authority in personal identity—Lepore stands for the reasonableness of the center. Events. That is the liberal view, and Lepore isn’t alone in seeing things that way. . To Republican Senators, Donald Trump Is Still the Boogeyman. He is the author of Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development and How to Hide an Empire. placementName: "thenation_right_rail", Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she writes about politics, history, law, and literature.Her dozen books include These Truths: A History of the United States, cited as “nothing short of a masterpiece” by NPR, and, out this fall, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her many books include the international bestseller These Truths and This America. Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. He began his career with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, as someone for whom political action meant registering voters. But given that the nation in question is also an empire—with Native American reservations, overseas territories, and hundreds of military bases spread across the planet—perhaps its members should also know a little about the other peoples and pasts this empire has engrossed.

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