Ezra's Bookshelf

These Truths

by Jill Lepore · 733 pages · ~13.5 hrs

HistoryPolitics & Government

Recommended on

buy on bookshop.org →
Jill Lepore undertakes the ambitious project of writing American history as a single narrative from 1492 to the present, unified by the theme of truth itself. She traces how Americans have struggled over facts, evidence, and the possibility of objective truth from the colonies through the digital age. The book weaves together political, intellectual, and cultural history, moving from Puritan sermons to the Declaration of Independence to Frederick Douglass to the rise of polling to the internet's fragmentation of shared reality. Lepore, a professor at Harvard and staff writer for The New Yorker, writes with literary flair while maintaining scholarly rigor. She gives particular attention to those excluded from earlier narratives—enslaved people, women, immigrants, Native Americans—showing how their struggles were essential to the American story, not supplements to it. The book's contemporary resonance is unmistakable, written during an era when truth itself has become contested. Lepore argues that the American experiment depends on citizens' ability to distinguish truth from lies and their commitment to evidence-based reasoning. This is both a comprehensive reference and an argument about what holds the nation together.

For fans of

Reviews