Tag: Jill Lepore

David Blight on Frederick Douglass: 'I call him beautifully human' Read more Harvard professor Jill Lepore chooses to begin her history of the United States with that quotation, and much of the worst of America, from lynching to brutality to Native Americans, is rightly here. Is it possible for the US – or any nation – to be ruled by reason and choice? This is, therefore, a history of political equality which necessarily becomes primarily a political history. The question nearly sundered the colonies from all government. Like so many Americans, Lepore asks that question and another: “By what right are we ruled?” Her aims are ambitious. Finally, “this book aims to be something else, too – an explanation of the nature of the past.” “History isn’t only a subject,” Lepore writes. Lepore offers an unabashedly liberal perspective, but seeks to be scrupulously fair to the modern conservative movement American politics has always been robust, but technology and better methods of analysis have magnified the impact. She offers an unabashedly liberal perspective, but seeks to be scrupulously fair to the modern conservative movement, devoting numerous pages to its intellectual origins as well as to its nativist and conspiratorial elements. This is a history for the 21st century, far more inclusive than the standard histories of the past. Lincoln did not say merely that we “can” save the country, but that we “shall”.