Jill Lepore: These Truths – A History of the United States
Three truths, no more and no less: political equality, natural rights, and sovereignty of the people. According to Thomas Jefferson, these truths were the foundation on which the American experiment rested. Most Americans recognize his words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” How apt, then, that Jill Lepore chose these words as the title of her brilliant new book: ‘These Truths.’ Lepore, staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor of history at Harvard, tracks these initial truths through the centuries, as they are sorely put to the test by slavery, racism, sexism, and many other alternate truths.
This is the second of the annual lecture series co-organized by the John Adams Institute and the Fulbright Commission.