Made possible by the Drue Heinz Trust
“No one is better equipped to have written this elegant, learned, and comprehensive history of the United States than Jill Lepore. These Truths is a brilliant narrative of the American past that speaks urgently to our present and to our future.”
Annette Gordon-Reed, American History and Law Professor, Harvard University, author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore offers a groundbreaking investigation into the origins of our divided nation. These Truths: A History of the United States follows her riveting Secret History of Wonder Woman.
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. 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 dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching,” writes Lepore in her exploration into the American past that places truth itself at the center of the nation’s history.
In The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Lepore argues that Wonder Woman is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights—a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later.
More about Jill Lepore
The New Yorker
Articles by Jill Lepore
The New Yorker, February 2018
The Strange and Twisted Life of “Frankenstein”
The New York Times, October 2014
Her Past Unchained, ‘The Secret History of Wonder Woman,’ by Jill Lepore
“In this inspiring and enlightening book, Jill Lepore accomplishes the grand task of telling us what we need to know about our past in order to be good citizens today. … she confronts the contradictions that come from being born a land of both liberty and slavery, but she uses such conflicts to find meaning—and hope—in the tale of America’s progress.”
Walter Isaacson, University Professor of History, Tulane, author of The Innovators
Book Signing
Join us in the Music Hall Foyer after the lecture to get your book signed or personalized. Classic Lines will have books for sale.