“Between reverence and worship, on the one side, and irreverence and contempt, on the other,” Lepore writes of her single-volume endeavor, “lies an uneasy path away from false pieties and petty triumphs over people who lived and died and committed both their acts of courage and their sins and errors long before we committed ours.” Historians are often cheerleaders or critics, but Lepore is less like Herodotus or Howard Zinn, and more like Hercule Poirot: sorting out what happened, but also why and how. These Truths does just that, surveying American history to see when the country reflected its founding commitments and when it belied them.

Lepore argues that the revision meant rights were no longer “the stuff of religion” but “the stuff of science.” The founders grounded their principles in reason, not because it necessarily conflicts with faith, but because anything self-evident could be observed, queried, and debated.

Her astounding new account of the American experiment-from when Columbus first stumbled on its shores to when President Donald Trump promised to put walls around them-is titled These Truths because of that substitution of evidence for reverence. The elder statesman’s changes were few, but critical: where Jefferson had written “these truths” were “sacred & undeniable,” Franklin crossed out the adjectives, and suggested instead that they were “self-evident.”Īccording to Kemper professor of American history Jill Lepore, it was the edit that changed the nation. It was two weeks before the United States would declare its independence from Great Britain, and Thomas Jefferson, having finished tinkering with his draft of the declaration, asked Franklin to review it. Only the ampersand is still visible Benjamin Franklin’s thick backslashes hide the words themselves.

Jill lepore these truths