“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year 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.
Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America 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. 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 wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “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. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her many books include the international bestseller These Truths and This America.
<b><i>New York Times </i>bestselling author of <i>The Wordy Shipmates </i>and contributor to NPR’s <i>This American Life</i> Sarah Vowell embarks
<P><b>Pulitzer Prize Finalist</b><br><br>Benjamin Franklin, perhaps <i>the </i>pivotal figure in colonial and revolutionary America, comes vividly to life in
<P>When fourteen-year-old Carlotta Walls walked up the stairs of Little Rock Central High School on September 25, 1957, she and eight other black students only wanted to make it to class. But
<B><i>Nothing Like It in the World</i> gives the account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage. It is the story of the men who built the transcontinental
<b><i>NEW YORK TIMES </i>BESTSELLER • A <i>NEW YORK TIMES </i>NOTABLE BOOK •  “Colonel Roosevelt is compelling reading, and [Edmund]
<b>David Halberstam’s masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain.</b><br><br><b>"A
<b>In a riveting, groundbreaking narrative, Russell Shorto tells the story of New Netherland, the Dutch colony which pre-dated the Pilgrims and established ideals of tolerance and individual
<P><b>“The work that brought down a presidency...perhaps the most influential piece of journalism in history” (<i>Time</i>)—from Bob Woodward and
<P><b>NATIONAL BESTSELLER - "A model presidential biography... Now, at last, we have a biography that is right for the man" - Jonathan Yardley, <i>The Washington Post Book
<B>From Alexander von Humboldt to Charles and Anne Lindbergh, these are stories of people of great vision and daring whose achievements continue to inspire us today, brilliantly told by master
Smarter than your old history teacher, funnier than the founding fathers, and more American than apple pie,<em> The Mental Floss History of the United States</em> is an almost (but not
