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, and 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.
Along the way, Lepore's sovereign chronicle is filled with arresting
sketches of both well-known and lesser-known Americans, from a parade of
presidents and a rogues' gallery of political mischief makers to the
intrepid leaders of protest movements, including Frederick Douglass, the
famed abolitionist orator; William Jennings Bryan, the three-time
presidential candidate and ultimately tragic populist; Pauli Murray, the
visionary civil rights strategist; and Phyllis Schlafly, the uncredited
architect of modern conservatism.
Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors
and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to
end immigration. "A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over
the meaning of its history," Lepore writes, but engaging in that
struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. "The
past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden," These Truths observes.
"It can't be shirked. There's nothing for it but to get to know it."
