2018 TheseTruthsAHistoryoftheUnitedS

• (Lepore, 2018) ⇒ Jill Lepore. (2018). “These Truths: A History of the United States.” WW Norton \& Company. ISBN:978-0-393-63524-9

Subject Headings: United States of America, National History, American History, U.S. Declaration of Independence.

Cited By

• http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%222018%22+These+Truths%3A+A+History+of+the+United+States

2021

• (Wikipedia, 2021) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/These_Truths Retrieved:2021-1-19.
  • These Truths: A History of the United States is a book of American history by historian Jill Lepore. It traces histories of American politics, law, society, and technology from the Age of Discovery through the present day. These Truths was published by W. W. Norton in September 2018.

2018

• https://nytimes.com/2018/09/14/books/review/jill-lepore-these-truths.html
  • QUOTE: ... It covers the history of political thought, the fabric of American social life over the centuries, classic “great man” accounts of contingencies, surprises, decisions, ironies and character, and the vivid experiences of those previously marginalized: women, African-Americans, Native Americans, homosexuals. It encompasses interesting takes on democracy and technology, shifts in demographics, revolutions in economics and the very nature of modernity. ...

    ... And, of course, it was and is full of contradictions: A radically new secularism founded it, and a political-religious fervor came to define it. As industrialization accelerated, and modernity beckoned, Americans turned back to God: Before the start of the Second Great Awakening, at the end of the 18th century, “a scant one in 10 Americans were church members; by the time it ended, that ratio had risen to eight in 10.” And these religious waves advanced the cause of the spiritual equality of all human beings, which in turn became political equality. “The self-evident, secular truths of the Declaration of Independence became, to evangelical Americans, the truths of revealed religion” is Lepore’s insight. ...

    ... Lepore’s most distinctive theme she refers to as “the machine”: a concern that newspapers, and then mass media, especially radio and television — in combination with pollsters and political consultants — progressively undermined any concept of empirical truth, and thereby slowly sank the reasoned deliberation essential to republican government ...

    ... what is the period of American history that most resembles today?, you would have to say, I think, the late 1850s and early 1860s. Here’s Lepore’s description of that time: “A sense of inevitability fell, as if there were a fate, a dismal dismantlement, that no series of events or accidents could thwart.” Lincoln thought of the nation as a house, and quoted Scripture: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” …

Quotes

Introduction: The Question Stated xi

…

... History isn’t only a subject; it’s also a method. My method is, generally, to let the dead speak for themselves. I’ve pressed their words between these pages, like flowers, for their beauty, or like insects, for their hideousness. The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist; it is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth.

…

... The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it. …

…

Part 1 The Idea (1492-1799)

In the beginning, all the World was America

--John Locke, The Second Treatise on Government, 1689.

4 The Constitution of a Nation 109

I

II

III

IV

…

... Yet the Constitution did not hold factions in check, and as early as 1791, Madison had begun to revise his thinking. In an essay called “Public Opinion,” he considered a source of instability particular to a large republic: the people might be deceived. “The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained,” he explained. That is, factions might not, in the end, consist of wise, knowledgeable, and reasonable men. They might consist of passionate, ignorant, and irrational men, who had been led to hold “counterfeit” opinions by persuasive men. (Madison was thinking of Hamilton and his ability to gain public support for his financial plan.) The way out of this political maze was the newspaper. “A circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people,” he explained, “is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits.” Newspapers would make the country, effectively, smaller.90

It was an ingenious idea. It would be revisited by each passing generation of exasperated advocates of republicanism. The newspaper would hold the Republic together; the telegraph would hold the Republic together; the radio would hold the Republic together; the Internet would hold the Republic together. Each time, this assertion would be both right and terribly wrong.

But Madison was shrewd to sense the importance of the relationship between technologies of communication and the forming of public opinion. The American two-party system, the nation’s enduring source of political stability, was forged in—and, fair to say, created by—the nation’s newspapers. Newspapers had shaped the ratification debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, and by 1791 newspapers were already beginning to shape the first party system, a contest between Federalists and those who aligned themselves with a newly emerging opposition: the Democratic-Republican Party, more usually known as Jeffersonians or Republicans. Jefferson and Madison, who founded the Democratic-Republican Party, believed that the fate of the Republic rested in the hands of farmers; Hamilton and the Federalist Party believed that the fate of the Republic rested in the development of industry. Each party boasted its own newspapers. In the 1790s, while Federalists battled Jeffersonian Republicans, newspapers grew four times as fast as the population.91

Newspapers in the early republic weren’t incidentally or inadvertently partisan; they were entirely and enthusiastically partisan. They weren’t especially interested in establishing facts; they were interested in staging a battle of opinions. “Professions of impartiality I shall make none,” wrote a Federalist printer. “They are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense.”92 The printer of the Connecticut Bee promised to publish news

Of turns of fortune, changes in the state,

The fall of fav’rites, projects of the great,

Of old mismanagements, taxations new,

All neither wholly false, nor wholly true.93 …

…

Epilogue: The Question Addressed 785

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... By the 1980s, influenced by the psychology and popular culture of trauma, the Left had abandoned solidarity across difference in favor of the meditation on and expression of suffering, a politics of feeling and resentment, of self and sensitivity. The Right, if it didn’t describe itself as engaging in identity politics, adopted the same model: the NRA, notably, cultivated the resentments and grievances of white men,

... Men talk of the Negro problem,” he began. “There is no Negro problem,” he said, his voice rising. “The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution.”123

... One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

... The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist; it is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth.

... We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. —Abraham Lincoln, 1862

... That the revival of Christianity coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, an anniversary made all the more mystical when the news spread that both Jefferson and Adams had died that very day, July 4, 1826, as if by the hand of God, meant that the Declaration itself took on a religious cast. The self-evident, secular truths of the Declaration of Independence became, to evangelical Americans, the truths of revealed religion. …

... the question of every rising and setting of the sun, on rainy days and snowy days, on clear days and cloudy days, at the clap of every thunderstorm. Can a political society really be governed by reflection and election, by reason and truth, rather than by accident and violence, by prejudice and deceit? Is there any arrangement of government—any constitution—by which it’s possible for a people to rule themselves, justly and fairly, and as equals, through the exercise of judgment and care?”

... The omitting the Word will be regarded as an Endeavour to conceal a principle of which we are ashamed.”

... Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1908, “because when all is said and done it is the mother, and the mother only, who is a better citizen even than the soldier who fights for his country.”

... Hours before Washington’s inauguration was scheduled to take place, a special congressional committee decided that it might be fitting for the president to rest his hand on a Bible while taking the oath of office. Unfortunately, no one in Federal Hall had a copy of the Bible on hand. There followed a mad dash to find one.”

... In one of the most wrenching tragedies in American history—a chronicle not lacking for tragedy—the Confederacy had lost the war, but it had won the peace.”

... Adams and Jefferson lived in an age of quantification. It began with the measurement of time. Time used to be a wheel that turned, and turned again; during the scientific revolution, time became a line. Time, the easiest quantity to measure, became the engine of every empirical inquiry: an axis, an arrow. This new use and understanding of time contributed to the idea of progress — if time is a line instead of a circle, things can get better and even better, instead of forever rising and falling in endless cycles, like the seasons. The idea of progress animated American independence and animated, too, the advance of capitalism. The quantification of time led to the quantification of everything else: the counting of people, the measurement of their labor, and the calculation of profit as a function of time.”

... (Wrote a skeptical E. B. White: “Although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.”)”

References

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2018 TheseTruthsAHistoryoftheUnitedS	Jill Lepore			These Truths: A History of the United States						2018