In the 1930s, Democracy in America Almost Died. Citizens Kept the Ideal Alive

Harvard historian Jill Lepore, in an article for The New Yorker, recounts the last time democracy almost died in America and around the world, in the 1930s, "from the Andes to the Urals and the Alps...Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it...(American democracy) staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political …

Incivility and Polarization in American Politics Have Been Much Worse

For all the incivility and demonization in contemporary American politics. there was a period when it was much more savage. Back in the 1830s through the 1850s, congressional battles over slavery descended into violence — duels, caning, pistol-whipping and threatening to slash an opponent with a knife. Of course, this was just prior to the …

‘The Lie Factory’: Political Public Relations in the 20th Century

How Politics Became a Business. By Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, 2012. The field of political consulting was unknown before Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker founded Campaigns, Inc., in 1933. And then in the 1940s, they tackled the health care issue in California and changed American health care and politics for more than half …

What to Leave Out of American History Intro Course?

American history, or any nation's history, can easily get bogged down in details, rather than main ideas. There will always be debate over what is essential to know and what is extraneous to the main ideas. Harvard Professor Jill Lepore aspired to communicate the main ideas and essential details in her critically acclaimed one-volume history …

One American Revolution Which Was Started in the 18th Century Did Not Succeed For Nearly 200 Years

"There were not one but two American revolutions at the end of the 18th century: the struggle for independence from Britain, and the struggle to end slavery. Only one was won." -- Jill Lepore, These Truths, page 76. Indeed, the movement to abolish slavery and provide equal rights for African Americans, what Lepore calls the …

Mainstream US History Largely Ignores Native American Perspectives, Historian Contends

Harvard Historian Jill Lepore's effort to create a consensus one-volume narrative of American history -- a shared past -- called These Truths that almost everyone can agree on has received begrudging praise from a conservative historian and sharp criticism from a liberal historian who says she perpetuates a colonial mindset and largely ignores and marginalizes …

Native Americans’ History Students Should Know

At a minimum, students of American history should know the following Native Americans, part of Jill Lepore's one-volume history of the US, These Truths. Historian Christine DeLucia writes that even this list gives short-shrift to perspectives of indigenous peoples, but it's a start. She writes that readers of Lepore's "ambitious tome encounter -- briefly: the …

Powhatan, King James Symbolized Relationship Between Native Americans and English Settlers. New Perspectives on Thanksgiving

The relationship between Native Americans and early English settlers was really bad, as John Green notes in the above video. It was symbolized by the relationship between Chief Powhatan (1545-1618) and King James I of England (1566-1625), the first Stuart King, as Jill Lepore eloquently wrote in These Truths: "The English called Powhatan ''king,' for …

Recognizing This ‘Dangerous Moment’ in History Might Be Our Only Salvation, Historians Write

The dizzying pace of technological change since the invention of the nuclear bomb has wildly outpaced the human capacity to control it or to morally reckon with it, historian Jill Lepore contends in "These Truths." Technological "advancements" in the creation of a consumer society manipulated by mass media -- first television, then the Internet -- …

Begrudging Praise from Conservative Historian for Lepore’s ‘These Truths’

Harvard Professor Jill Lepore's attempt to write a universally-accepted one-volume history of the US, These Truths, has won begrudging praise from the National Review's Stephen Tootle, a PhD history professor at the College of the Sequoias. The first part of his review is full of negative assertions, without providing evidence, that Lepore is a liberal …