American Academy Lecture

These Truths: A History of the United States

In her recent book These Truths: A History of the United States, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore offers an account of the grand American experiment. The United States was founded on three ideas—“these truths,” as Thomas Jefferson called them: political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. Lepore adds to this list the search for truth itself, the American dedication to fearless inquiry, no matter where it leads. But in what ways has the US fulfilled these “truths,” and in which ways has it not? To answer this question, Lepore explores the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology—from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine, from talk radio to twenty-first-century Internet polls, from the Magna Carta to the Patriot Act, from the printing press to Facebook.

These Truths: A History of the United States (W.W. Norton, 2018) will be published in German in October by C.H. Beck as Diese Wahrheiten. Geschichte der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, in the series “Historische Bibliothek der Gerda Henkel Stiftung.”

In cooperation with Verlag C.H. Beck