These Truths: A History of the United States

In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history. Written in elegiac prose, Lepore's groundbreaking investigation 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. And it rests, too, on a fearless dedication to inquiry, Lepore argues, because self-government depends on it. 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 traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, technology, from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine,from talk radio to twenty-first-century Internet polls,from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act,from the printing press to Facebook News