As the author and researcher of These Truths, Jill Lepore uses the text to pose some of her own questions about the success of the American experiment. Additionally, her approach to historiography focuses greater attention on how the subjugation of particular groups—indigenous peoples, people of African descent, and women—were key in the formation of the new republic. In the Introduction, Lepore notes that she wrote the book because no one had attempted to write a history of the United States from beginning to end in many years. One reason this is important, for Lepore, is that she regards the study of history as a method of inquiry. Her approach to the writing of this history is humble. She is careful to note that she did not set out to write the entire history of the United States, as no one could do that. Instead, she has confined herself to writing what she believes a nation in the early 21st century needs to know about its past.

Jill Lepore

Described as “a broad-shouldered sea captain from Genoa,” Christopher Columbus, who became a figure of controversy in the last quarter of the 20th century, was an Italian explorer, funded by the Spanish monarchy, who inadvertently “discovered” North America (3).

Christopher Columbus

Bartolomé de Las Casas

Edward Coke

John Locke

Thomas Paine

Benjamin Franklin

Jane Franklin

John Adams

Thomas Jefferson

James Madison

George Mason

George Washington

Alexander Hamilton

John Quincy Adams

Andrew Jackson

William Lloyd Garrison

Henry David Thoreau

Frederick Douglass

Margaret Fuller

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Harriet Tubman

Abraham Lincoln

John Brown

Mary Lease

Henry George

William Jennings Bryan

Frederick Jackson Turner

Ida B. Wells

Walter Lippmann

Frederick Winslow Taylor

Theodore Roosevelt

W. E. B. Du Bois

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Henry Ford

Herbert Hoover

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt

Malcolm X

Lyndon B. Johnson

George Gallup

Pauli Murray

Harry S. Truman

Earl Warren

Richard Nixon

John F. Kennedy

Thurgood Marshall

Martin Luther King Jr.

Ella Baker

George Wallace

Barry Goldwater

Phyllis Schlafly

Ronald Reagan

Stokely Carmichael

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Bill Clinton

Barack Obama

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About These Truths

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Introduction

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Part 1: “The Idea (1492-1799)”

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Part 2: “The People (1800-1865)”

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Part 3: “The State (1866-1945)”

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Part 4: “The Machine (1946-2016)”

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These Truths: A History of the United States

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