The first part, “The Idea (1492-1799),” carries the reader through the era of early settlement to colonial America, when the nation’s foundational principles took root and Americans fought their first battles over territory and political sovereignty. Lepore also assesses the success so far of the political experiment that is the United States. Lepore explores how those ideas have been revisited over the centuries, particularly as the nation faced upheavals over slavery, the Civil War, industrialism, Progressivist reforms, two world wars, the Cold War, periods of economic crises and prosperity, and the election of the first African American president. The main text is bookended by an introduction and an epilogue that examine the feasibility of forming a nation out of three political ideas rooted in Enlightenment-era thought: political equality, natural rights, and the people’s sovereignty. The book is divided into four major parts, each chronicling the nation’s genesis. Lepore decidedly marks the United States’ origins within the Age of Discovery-particularly, Genoan explorer Christopher Columbus’s adventures on the island that the native Taíno called “Haiti,” and what Columbus called “Hispaniola,” or “little Spain.” Unlike many previous histories of the United States, Lepore frequently reminds the reader of the nation’s roots in dispossession, enslavement, colonialism, and the act of claiming both territory and authority through writing.

The organization of These Truths is chronological. This guide uses the electronic book version of the text. Lepore’s other books include The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (2013), a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction and her national bestseller, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014), which won the American History Book Prize. These Truths is the winner of the Council on Foreign Relations’ 2020 Arthur Ross Book Award.

Since 2005, Lepore has been a staff writer for the New Yorker, writing mostly about American history.

She is also an instructor at Harvard Law School. Lepore, the daughter of public school teachers, is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University.

These truths historian jill