The Jillster (Jill Lepore) is about to go up the hill (mountain?) of history stardom. At the beginning of this week, this blog offered an early look at The Jillster's most recent book. Today's essay offers a suggestion of the elevation of Lepore as a US historian. If this is (fair & balanced) appreciation of -good- great history scholarship, so be it.
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Jill Lepore On Writing The Story Of America (In 1,000 Pages Or Less)
By Jennifer Schuessler
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Historians can be wary of writing about the present. But sometimes, the present has other ideas.
On Election Day 2016, Jill Lepore was deep into working on These Truths, her sprawling new history of the United States (in the middle of her chapter about the Civil War, as it happens).
“I had planned to end with Obama’s inauguration,” she said in a recent interview in her office, deep in the stacks of Widener Library at Harvard, where she has taught since 2003. “It seemed like a good landing, not in a partisan way, but as a matter of American history. A lot of themes were popping right then.”
Then came Donald Trump’s surprise victory. “I realized I needed to change the last chapter,” she said. “It was just a watershed political moment. To not adjust to end there just seemed wrong, like a dereliction of duty as a historian.”
These Truths: A History of the United States, published by W. W. Norton on September 18, and weighing in at a whopping 932 pages, could not be better timed, or titled, as reviewers have noted. “It isn’t until you start reading it that you realize how much we need a book like this one at this particular moment,” Andrew Sullivan wrote in a rave in The New York Times Book Review.
American politics have always been infused with claims about American history, but the Trump era has sent debates over everything from the Constitution to the Civil War to the idea of truth itself into overdrive. While the book contains reflections on the importance of shared truth to democracy, Professor Lepore mostly focuses on telling the nose-to-tail American story — a “stirring, terrifying, inspiring, troubling, earthshaking epic,” as she sums it up.
It’s a change of scale for a scholar who built her reputation writing microhistory [PDF], which mines small incidents and obscure lives to explore broader cultural themes. But if anyone’s up to the task of condensing the whole American shebang into a single readable volume, friends and colleagues say, it’s Professor Lepore, whose productivity and narrative superpowers invite comparisons to the subject of her 2014 book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (a stranger-than-fiction comic book origin story that also touched on polyamory, the invention of the lie detector test and early birth control politics).
She is the author of 12 books and, since 2005, a seemingly constant stream of elegantly turned essays on (extremely) various subjects in The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer. Ask colleagues and editors, and you’ll get stories about revisions sent in overnight (or sooner), bodies of literature absorbed in a few weeks, unexpected topics teased out of unlikely corners.
“Jill is a blindingly fast writer,” said Henry Finder, the editorial director of The New Yorker, where over the past year alone she has written about the rise of the victims’ rights movement, the origins of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the legacy of Rachel Carson, the evolution of American mortuary practices and an intellectual property fight involving Barbie, among other subjects.
Professor Lepore, who recently turned 52 (and, by the way, also has three teenage children), seems used to questions about how she does it.
“I have a lot of energy,” she said, slipping off her shoes and tucking her feet under herself in an armchair positioned beneath a poster of the Declaration of Independence (whose most famous line gives “These Truths” its title). “If I’m not writing, or doing another project, I’m quite difficult to be around. It’s really like a fix, a need.”
Professor Lepore grew up in West Boylston, MA., on Franklin Street, as in Ben. She would later write a biography of Franklin’s nearly forgotten youngest sister, Jane, yet a career in history was hardly foreordained.
She wasn’t the kind of kid who wanted to visit Gettysburg, she said, or checked out biographies of Amelia Earhart, but she was interested in how people became who they were.
On weekends, her father, a school principal, would let her use the typewriter in his office, where she tapped out stories with titles like James the Dog.
“I just always wanted to be a writer,” Professor Lepore said. “I fell into writing about history, and I love writing about history, but I’d write about anything.”
She went to Tufts on an ROTC scholarship, where she started out majoring in math. She dropped out of ROTC and switched to English, graduating in three years, she said, to save on tuition.
Professor Lepore, who has published exactly one personal essay (about her mother, an art teacher, who died in 2012), can be reticent about herself. Asked what helped push her toward becoming a historian, she offered two “just-so” stories.
The first involved a “vicious letter” she got in college. It was from Jill Lepore, who had written it three years earlier, to her future self, as part of a high-school English assignment.
“It said, ‘If you’re not doing what you should be doing, I’m embarrassed for you. Drop everything!’” she said. “I had no memory of writing it. I found it fascinating that it preserved a moment in time.”
The second came after graduation, when she spent two years working as a secretary, including at Harvard. She was trying to write novels, and sitting in on classes. Then one day she won the “Best Secretary” award, which she took as a signal to move on.
She applied to graduate school, eventually getting a PhD in American Studies from Yale. She went in wanting to write women’s history, but the Persian Gulf war, which many of her ROTC friends fought in, shifted her focus.
Her first book, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1998, explored the 17th-century Native American uprising that is considered the deadliest conflict in American history, by percentage of the population killed. The book, which excavated the Native American perspective from the skimpy documentary record, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize.
“From the beginning, she had a most unusual, ambitious and creative mind,” said Nancy F. Cott, a recently retired colleague at Harvard who taught Professor Lepore in a graduate seminar at Yale. “She has really found ways to use evidence to write about people who haven’t been written about.”
Next came books about writing systems and American identity (A Is for American [2003]); a mostly forgotten 18th-century slave rebellion (New York Burning [2005]); and the Tea Party’s use of American history (The Whites of Their Eyes [2010]).
Even when filing an essay spurred by a group of books, Mr. Finder of The New Yorker said, Professor Lepore will send in detailed footnotes that sometimes include primary source documents that seem to have never been cited before.
“Her gravitation towards dust, towards opening boxes that haven’t seen light for decades, has clearly never faded,” he said.
Professor Lepore is a quilter and self-described “craft-head” — she spent part of the summer painting a mural in her farmhouse in Vermont — and fans may notice bits of earlier books and essays subtly stitched into These Truths (which was edited by Robert Weil). She also vacuumed up secondary literature.
“I wrote strictly chronologically, and for every chapter I would check out a gazillion books,” she said. “The security guard at the library would always ask, ‘What year are you on?’”
Efforts to tell the whole story of America has its own, deeply political history, from George Bancroft’s ardently nationalistic and pro-Andrew Jackson multivolume “History of the United States,” published starting in 1834 to the radical scholar Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980).
Professor Lepore, whose book hardly stints on the dark side, said she was most moved by examples from the 1920s and ’30s by historians like Charles and Mary Ritter Beard and James Truslow Adams (who coined the term “American dream”).
“They were all pretty significant critics of the United States government,” she said. “And yet, with fascism on the rise around the world, they decided it was important to write an account of where democracy came from, and what it needs to survive — not to indict anybody or prosecute anybody or elevate themselves, but to offer a tonic, and a little bit of a recipe.”
The book includes many women and people of color, not as tokens but as political actors. (For whatever it’s worth, These Truths, which will be released later in a textbook version, appears to be the first solo-authored one-volume history of America by a woman.)
And they aren’t all feminists or progressives.
We get cameos by the pioneering journalist Margaret Fuller and the anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, but also Mary Elizabeth Lease, a 19th-century populist whose nativism might have worn a Make American Great Again hat, and Phyllis Schlafly, leader of the brigade of suburban housewife-activists who largely powered the postwar conservative movement.
“I would say, more often in American politics, women have been a conservative force rather than a liberal one,” Professor Lepore said.
There’s also, perhaps more unexpectedly, an emphasis on technology, especially communications technology. Professor Lepore (whose husband is a computer scientist) takes a dim view of the rise of political consultants and polling, and don’t get her started on Silicon Valley’s cult of “disruption.”
If These Truths ends on a note of “Gibbonesque foreboding,” as she put it, she hopes it will take us out of the frenzy of the present and provide perspective, if not necessarily comfort.
“Yes, the internet is disruptive of democracy, but this has happened before,” she said. “You shouldn’t stop worrying. But here’s a way to be a more informed worrier.” # # #
[Jennifer Schuessler is staff editor at The New York Times Book Review. Before joining The Times in 2003, she was an editor at The New York Review of Books and The Boston Globe's Sunday Ideas section. She has contributed articles on books and culture to a number of publications, including The Times Book Review, The New York Review, The American Scholar, and The Washington Post. Schuessler received a BA (history) from Harvard University (MA).]
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