Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard University, but is better known to the reading public for a series of acclaimed books for general audiences and her work as a staff writer at The New Yorker. In These Truths, Lepore approaches American history through the lens of two forms of truth, which at times she tends to conflate. The first is the ‘truths’ of her book’s title, which refers to the Declaration of Independence. America’s founders declared political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people to be ‘self-evident’ truths; Lepore sets out to determine whether the United States was actually built on these shared ideals and, if so, whether Americans have tended to abandon them. The second variety of truth is that of empirical truth; how have Americans come to understand what constitute facts about the world, and how has that informed the nation’s political discourse?

Barack Obama hands over presidency to Donald Trump at 58th Presidential Inauguration (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

To explore these questions, Lepore has chosen to write a political history, supplemented with ‘episodes in the history of American law and religion, journalism and technology’. Lepore has chosen this curious collection of topics because this is where, according to her, what constitutes ‘truth’ has been sorted out in American life. Yet long before the book’s final two chapters, covering the last forty years of American politics, it becomes apparent that the spectre of the 2016 presidential election looms large over this project.

Lepore has produced an account of American history whose overall tone is melancholic. At certain points in their history, Lepore argues, Americans did create a working consensus on what constituted both ‘political’ truth and ‘empirical’ truth. But in the past few decades, Lepore believes that almost all actors in the US polity have abandoned the nation’s founding ideas and cannot agree on what constitutes verifiable truth. The result has been polarisation, political gridlock, and, ultimately, the election of Donald Trump.

Lepore’s focus on national political discourse means that her book becomes livelier as it moves through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the populace grows, and as its national politics becomes more complex and (relatively) inclusive. Parts One and Two of the book, taking us through to the end of the American Civil War, are largely concerned with the battle over slavery. Lepore rightly sees the abolitionist movement as representing the best of America, but she also stresses the importance of slaves themselves in shaping America’s national discourse. Lepore shows how a long series of slave rebellions forced Americans to directly confront the violence of slavery, helped build the movement for abolition, and moved America towards Civil War. Yet she also acknowledges that even with all that the abolitionists achieved, the weight of all that went before cannot be denied. In one of the book’s finest moments, Lepore argues that, in mourning the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, ‘Americans deferred a different grief, a vaster and more dire reckoning with centuries of suffering and loss.’

Dead soldiers after the Battle of Gettysburg in July, 1863, during the American Civil War (negative by Timothy H. O'Sullivan and positive by Alexander Gardner/Wikimedia Commons

While Lepore powerfully reveals the extent to which slavery was fundamental to early American politics, she largely overlooks the other ‘original sin’ of the United States: the conquest, displacement, and massacre of American Indians. Outside of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1832, which directly led to the ‘Trail of Tears’, Native Americans are mostly portrayed as having little consequence for American political discourse. This is particularly glaring in Lepore’s two chapters on the Revolution; in recent decades, historians have emphasised the centrality of conflicts between colonists and Indians to the origins, course, and outcomes of the American Revolution. Disappointingly for a historian who has written multiple books on early America, including one on a seventeenth-century war between Indians and colonists in New England, Lepore’s narrative fails to explore these issues.

In Parts Three and Four, taking us from the end of the Civil War to the fateful year 2016, Lepore focuses on the problems Americans had creating a functional political discourse as the nation industrialised, grew more unequal, and encountered technological developments that constantly reshaped political discourse – photography, mass production, radio, television, and, finally (and worst of all), the internet. Naturally, the weight of the present becomes more and more pronounced, as does the role of Lepore’s pre-existing writings for The New Yorker. Lepore argues that over the course of the twentieth century, American politics was increasingly shaped for the worse by the opinion polling industry and public relations. These professionals exploited and exacerbated the weaknesses of mass politics; polling made public opinion a fixed, quantifiable thing that politicians treated as immovable. Public relations experts, meanwhile, poisoned political discourse by running campaigns that appealed to people’s base emotions, preventing genuine deliberation for the benefit of (mostly) conservative politicians.

Jill Lepore (photograph by Dari Pillsbury)Consequently, American politics went from the high points of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal – which Lepore writes about with wistful admiration – and the Voting Rights Act, to the supremacy of the New Right following the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Along the way, abortion and gun control, issues of little note before the 1970s, turned into the crux of a deep political polarisation. Lepore has no answers to what has gone wrong with America, other than a tortured metaphor about the ‘ship of state’ with which the book ends. There is something remarkable about reading an account of US history that ends on a note of such despair.

Yet Lepore’s account of the New Right also points to the limitations of this book. The reader will learn much about American political discourse, but, other than a few extraordinary figures, they will not learn much about the American people. In paying little attention to the experiences of most people, Lepore cannot give a satisfactory explanation as to why Americans have abandoned those founding ‘truths’. Her primary argument is that their ability to reason has been overwhelmed by technological and commercial developments that have warped politics beyond recognition. Perhaps that is part of the story; but in not considering how Americans grappled with politics in their homes, communities, workplaces, or on the frontier, Lepore leaves the American people with only a minor role in their own history