History

These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore

Item: These Truths: A History of the United States
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Author: Ben Vine

by Ben Vine •

January-February 2019, no. 408

W.W. Norton & Company, $62.95 hb, 953 pp, 9780393635249

History

These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore

by Ben Vine •

January-February 2019, no. 408

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama declared that the story of American history is of countless people striving toward ‘a more perfect union’, that most utopian of goals enshrined in the nation’s Constitution. In These Truths, a one-volume account of the entirety of American history since European settlement, Jill Lepore praises Obama’s unifying rhetoric, but believes the tide of American history is against him.

Ben Vine

Ben Vine is a Sydney-based historian. He recently completed a PhD in the Department of History at the University of Sydney, where he teachers American history. He has written on early America, American social history, and veterans of the American Revolutionary War who were among the first European settlers of Australia.