This is Democracy – Episode 210: Can History Bring Us Together?

This is democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today’s important issues and how to have a voice and what happens next.

[00:00:24] Jeremi: Welcome to our new episode of this is democracy.

[00:00:28] Jeremi: This week. We’re very fortunate to be joined by a, uh, highly regarded scholar, popular writer. And really, I think someone who’s doing some of the most interesting investigations of history and society in the United. States today. Uh, this is Jill Lepore, uh, Jill and I have overlapped, I think a few times in different places, but it’s really, uh, wonderful to have the opportunity to talk to her today.

[00:00:52] Jeremi: Jill is the David Woods, Kemper class of 41 professor of American history at Harvard university. She’s also a staff writer at the new Yorker. I’m sure many of you have read and seen many of her articles there. And she’s the author of many, many, uh, prize winning and bestselling books. I can’t name them all.

[00:01:10] Jeremi: I’m just gonna name my four favorite, the name of war king, Phillips war and the origins of American identity, which was Jill’s first book. And, and I think her dissertation originally, New York burning Liberty slavery. And conspiracy in 18th century Manhattan, a book that taught me a lot about the city. I grew up in the secret history of wonder woman, which I, I, I think is a real hoot, uh, to read.

[00:01:35] Jeremi: Uh, and then, uh, these truths, a history of the United States, which is, uh, a professor Lepore’s most recent book and the book we’ll be talking a bit about today. Um, welcome to our podcast, Jill.

[00:01:47] Jill Lepore: Hey, thanks so much for everything fun to be here.

[00:01:49] Jeremi: Before we turn to our discussion with, uh, Jill Lepore, we have, of course.

[00:01:54] Jeremi: Uh, Mr. Zachary poem, what’s your title of your poem?

[00:01:58] Zachary: An American history.

[00:02:00] Jeremi: Let’s hear it

[00:02:01] Zachary: in the moments when they tossed the tea off the arrogant boats and watched the Harbor turn brown and golden in the Dawn light. They were not really saying no as much as they were saying, listen, And in the excruciating dullness of the hallowed halls, where they felt out in the still summer air, the future, they never imagined to be more than 10, maybe 20 years.

[00:02:26] Zachary: They didn’t see the moment as a prophecy or the product of some divinity. They were people. These were their ideal. If you want to escape history, be a Seagul. If you want to make history, be a porcupine in these moments, we are porcupines. We build ourselves an armor that sprouts from our own skin. And then again, one morning we wake up seagulls and we float out to sea on the drifting breeze and circle the great blue nothingness.

[00:02:55] Zachary: So we don’t have to look back so we can fly to the paradise on the other side. we have made our own history and we have tried to escape. But there is only one truth to history and it is simply that there is no going back. There is no starting over again at the beginning, even the dead get gravestones and the living walk solemnly passed and place rocks in neat lines along the top.

[00:03:20] Zachary: So they can feel below that the world in all its vein existence is still there. And that gravity is still pulling us towards and away from each other at the same time. Mean, we all have the courage to accept this fact. So we can say with confidence when the time comes, I have made my own history and like a true American.

[00:03:43] Zachary: I have done my utmost to outlive it.

[00:03:46] Jeremi: I love the punchline, Zachary. Um, what is your poem about?

[00:03:50] Zachary: My poem is really about the ways in which we as Americans, uh, have this very, um, not overblown, but very, uh, grandiose sense of our own history. But at the same time we remain so ignorant of so many aspects of it.

[00:04:01] Zachary: Um, and, and it’s almost intentional, uh, the way that we, we view our history. Um, but there is also this, this overwhelming sense of optimism that I think what is, is what makes, uh, the United States, uh, so attractive or at least endear. Mm-hmm

[00:04:16] Jeremi: mm-hmm Jill. What I love about your work and particularly your most recent book, uh, these truths is, um, like Zachary’s poem.

[00:04:24] Jeremi: I mean, you, you meditate on many of the difficult parts of our history. Slaveries at the center of your, of your history, but yet it is optimistic. You, you are, you, you, you seem to believe that we can find a history and a way of telling that history that will bring us all together. Can, can you say more about that?

[00:04:41] Jill Lepore: I think that’s a forced optimism. Um, thank you for the lovely poem, Zach. I was really stirred by it and I love the seagull and the porcupine in particular. I, um, I have buried many, a dead porcupine . I have dogs who are porcupine hunters and this ends badly for all one at all. so I have an intimate acquaintance with a life cycle of a porcupine.

[00:05:08] Jill Lepore: very good. Once wrote about a great deal about porcine. Um, so kind of means something to me also, porcupines are just such a funny American phenomenon. Yes. Um, so an answer, but to answer your question, Jeremy, I, um, I had been very uninterested in writing this book, right. Taking on the task of trying to write a synthetic account of all of American history.

[00:05:33] Jill Lepore: And I was asked to do it for a college edition and my publisher Norton has a big col you know, the best college division and they wanted to have a new single author, us history book. And. I just thought that sounded like really the worst possible writing assignment. And I’m, I would say I am chiefly a writer, I’m incidentally a historian.

[00:05:52] Jill Lepore: And, but I would write about anything and often do I don’t always write history. And, um, and, and then I felt this real burden, uh, about that refusal that it really bothered me that I didn’t think there was a good single. Trade book in particular, the, you know, the textbooks are usually teams of writers and they don’t often really make a whole lot of sense.

[00:06:18] Jill Lepore: Um, and they’re generally a misery to read. So I wanted to try to write this actu you know, a book, not a textbook and. Knew though that this hadn’t really been attempted for generations, my generation, your, you know, our generat, like the, since the 1960s, right? The idea of writing a single author, synthetic sweeping narrative history of the United States was utterly untenable.

[00:06:48] Jill Lepore: And for a long time, it just would’ve been wholly irresponsible. Right? So starting in the 1960s, when women and people of color entered the academy got PhDs, became professors went into the archives, did amazing work, wrote articles and monographs, and it pretty much exploded the scholarship of American history.

[00:07:03] Jill Lepore: And what they were interested in was conflict among groups, you know, excavating the history of the group, to which they belonged often, most cases like founding women’s history and black history, Chicano history. And wonderfully excavating archival sources and telling stories that had never been told before, but very much invested in, in that redemptive work.

[00:07:26] Jill Lepore: Right. Uh, just redeeming from the obscurity of history of at least within academic history. Um, I don’t mean in a, in, in a more moral sense, but, but that vision for the urgency and importance of that work was. In involve the complete dismissal of the possibility of anyone doing anything sweeping or synthetic, right?

[00:07:47] Jill Lepore: You couldn’t really care about indigenous history and pretend to be writing a national history. Those two things were just opposed to one another, right? Like indigenous peoples in the Americas are their own nations. Like how could you include them? It would just be an act itself of colonization to put them in a national history.

[00:08:04] Jill Lepore: Right. So they’re just really profound intellectual and, and also deep political objections to that very idea of the project. And when I was coming up and getting trained, like that’s what everybody was trained with, but that meanwhile out there in the world, outside of academic institutions and K through eight and, you know, high school classrooms, people have to teach national history.

[00:08:24] Jill Lepore: Sure. It’s required by state legislatures. And so curricular material is, you know, was being developed and made and is increasingly as school budgets. Plummeting school teachers were using kind of the cheapest thing that was out there, which is gonna just tend to be really kooky triumphalist non-academic in fact specifically anti-intellectual right.

[00:08:50] Jill Lepore: So, so eventually I, this, this wore me down and I realized in spite of on the one hand scholars thinking this is an untenable and indefensible intellectual project, um, and the, and, and yeah. So in spite, in spite of that, the, the need that seemed to be a felt need in for the general public to have a meaningful new interpretation that attempted, you know, this is a lot of original work in there, but it’s, it’s obviously really I’m synthesizing the work of generations of incredible scholars.

[00:09:24] Jill Lepore: Who’ve done this work. Like I read a lot of books to write this book, you know, It seemed to me it was worth a try, um, to say this is actually work that academic historians ought to be doing mm-hmm and it’s not meant to be the last word it’s meant to an idea I had in doing it was to attempt to rekindle a tradition whereby at a certain kind of point in your writing life as an academic historian, when might take on.

[00:09:50] Jill Lepore: The obligation to attempt to write a sweeping synthesis of the nation’s past. Right. Um, so that’s what I tried to do. Do, do I think that it itself brings people together or is a Testament to my personal optimism? I think it can easily be read that way, because that was probably intended on my part to kind of, it has, um, there, there are a number of principled calls.

[00:10:14] Jill Lepore: To civic responsibility, um, within the text itself. So I, I, I don’t mean to gain say my own words. Mm-hmm but just to say, uh, even in the years, since I wrote that book, things have gotten a lot messier, right.

[00:10:28] Jeremi: But you do say early on actually two or three times in, in a really wonderful introduction. Which is unique for a grand narrative, cuz you, you, you struggle with the idea of a grand narrative in your introduction, but you do say a few times I have tried to cross a divide, uh, and, and I’m, I’m curious, you know, what you, what you think that is, cuz many people would say that, uh, often with different politics from you and different politics from me, they would say, you know, we need to a certain kind of traditional history because it’s what brings us together.

[00:10:58] Jeremi: Mm-hmm. You seem to make the argument here that at least there’s a possibility that a different kind of history, a non-traditional history, that’s still attentive to Ben Franklin. You write a lot about him in here. Could bring us together. You can cross a divide. So what do you mean by that? How do you think about

that?

[00:11:12] Jill Lepore: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, our account of the nation’s past is as polarized as our politics are, and that’s an untenable situation for a NA for a national people, right. There needs to be some sense of, of a shared past, um, to be able to cuz that’s the foundation with which one looks ahead. Right.

[00:11:31] Jill Lepore: Mm-hmm and. Maybe this, these things seemed kind of commonplace and obvious now because we’re in the middle of these crazy school, school room, history wars with you can’t teach this and you must teach that. Um, but I don’t think that was as obvious even to most people just a few years ago cuz the stakes weren’t it weren’t completely clear, but for a long time now, certainly since well for a very long time, but certainly since let’s say the 1990s.

[00:11:58] Jill Lepore: The stories that Americans tell about the nation’s past have been diverging, right? So there’s, there’s this, this very, um, very conservative, traditional account that is the really dates to the 1950s and is a very whitewashed version of American history. And then there’s a quite radical in which EV which America has never done any wrong.

[00:12:23] Jill Lepore: Right. Um, and then there’s a, another. Uh, to the far left an account, we might associate this with sort of Howard’s in mm-hmm , mm-hmm, in the seventies and people’s history and, and maybe with 16, 19 project now. Right, right. Where. the story of American history is, is a, is a litany of atrocity, right. American.

[00:12:42] Jill Lepore: And in, in the matter foreign policy, America’s never done anything. Good. Um, maybe you could, so the right with, do you remember when Newt Gingrich had, um, to renew American civilization, he had this like video cassette lecture series, you know, I have tried

[00:12:55] Jeremi: to forget that I cannot forget it. It was so bad.

[00:12:57] Jeremi: So Gingrich

[00:12:58] Jill Lepore: had a PhD in history. Yes. And he fashioned himself very much or especially early in his congressional career. The history professor member of Congress and he, he, he packaged. And so with some significant influence, I think we have not, he had begun to measure the influence of his American history.

[00:13:14] Jill Lepore: Yes. Curriculum. But so, you know, on the one hand you on the one hit side, you have that on the other side, you know, like generational go, you heads in maybe. Um, and to be sure there’s some truth in both of those accounts. But there’s no, , it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s, it’s an impoverished political community.

[00:13:32] Jill Lepore: When kids in some school districts are reading the ones, kids, like how can they even have a conversation? Right, right. That’s they’re not the same country right now. I mean, there’s not, there doesn’t need to be a uniformity. Right. Like we would, God forbid, we lived in a nation state that said here is the nation’s history.

[00:13:47] Jill Lepore: Everyone must agree to it. Right. Like that is, that is a terrible injustice as. Um, but the fact that, you know, history is a body of inquiry that relies on scholarship that is constantly churning and making new discoveries. That’s the piece that is interesting as a matter of pedagogy, right? So crossing a divide is to say, this is a book in which.

[00:14:07] Jill Lepore: You, you know, you will find just a very long litany of atrocities and you will also find a tremendous amount of beauty and triumph and invention, um, and, and generosity. Uh, the kind of, you know, beacon of light that in, in the, in the brightest of times, the nation has understood itself to be, and its best moral and most moral political actors, um, have in fact been.

[00:14:32] Jill Lepore: I, I don’t think that the two are mutual exclusive, but it is a less, um, you know, it’s a way less sexy thing. Mm-hmm to be the book that is like, well, you know, on the one hand, but also on the other hand mm-hmm , um, that is a, that is a despised form of moderation, um, politically. Right. Um, and I think there’s increasingly very little.

[00:14:56] Jill Lepore: For that within academic life. Right, right, right. Maybe you would disagree with that. I’d be curious to hear. No, I, I

[00:15:01] Jeremi: actually, I agree with that and I think, uh, like the rest of our society, um, it’s much easier to label than it is to explain. And we do a lot of labeling as scholars also of in groups and out groups.

[00:15:12] Jeremi: And I don’t think, uh, that necessarily maps onto our politics, but often. It does map onto our, our, our politics. I, I was struck in this book and in your scholarship as a whole, you, you were trained as a colonial early, early Americanist. I I’ve, I, I see your work as a public intellectual as someone who’s trying, not just to cross divide, but to get us to think about how we can believe in the truths that you highlight here, equality, sovereignty, uh, democracy.

[00:15:41] Jeremi: But also be conscious of, uh, of slavery, be conscious of the exclusions in our society, the mistreatment of, uh, native peoples that you’ve written a lot, uh, uh, about how do you see those things coming together? When you talk to audiences about our history, you, you Revere Ben Franklin. You’ve written so much about him.

[00:16:00] Jeremi: He’s a big section. I want to give away the whole book, but I hope people will read the book to read more about Ben Franklin he’s in here. Um, but then you also spend a lot of time on, on slavery. How do you, how do you explain those worlds together? Yeah,

[00:16:12] Jill Lepore: so, well, I don’t to be fussy, but I wouldn’t say I Revere Ben Franklin.

[00:16:16] Jill Lepore: I find him very funny, mostly cuz he is filthy. Like I use just as the most filthy of the Frank of, of the framers. I find him an incredible companion on the

[00:16:24] Jeremi: page. And you make him fascinating to the reader. I will see.

[00:16:27] Jill Lepore: I, I, I I’ve really. I find him fascinating, but that’s largely cuz I, I wrote a biography of his sister Jane.

[00:16:33] Jill Lepore: Um, so I spend a lot of time with the Franklins many years ago, many, many years with them. Um, I guess I would say, you know, the, the, the, the. The sort of grotesque version and, and, and Zachary, you’re close enough to this age wise that maybe you’ve encountered this. There is a kind of like middle school, middle grades, us history textbook that is like Lada da, and then this, and then this, and, and then there’s like a sidebar and it’s like, and also slavery, right?

[00:16:59] Jill Lepore: Yes. Or like, and this is sidebar and like, oh, Plains Indian warfare. Now they’re all, you know, and then. And you just kinda LA oh, the industrial revolution had some losers. They’re losers though. LA like it’s a weird, the, the there’s like the one narrative and then it doesn’t even rise to the level of a subplot.

[00:17:18] Jill Lepore: It’s almost like a stagey aside, like a whisper aside. Oh yes. Slavery, you know, and like, as it, and of course. Slavery is an economic system. It is a political system. It is an act of war. It is many, many things. It is a social experience. Um, it, it is a, it is a series of acts of repeated violence. It is an inherited.

[00:17:40] Jill Lepore: So like there’s a lot in the institution that requires examination and the way architecturally my book works. Um, and the reason that, uh, I think the side, the sidebar, even if the sidebar is like, if it’s the inverse, right. If it’s. oh, this terrible, terrible, terrible. Okay. But maybe there, you know, there was, you know, the Atlantic charter had some good ideas in it, but terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible.

[00:18:07] Jill Lepore: You know, like either way, it’s a, it’s a craziness cuz it’s the, it’s the, it’s the waxing and the waning. It’s the warp and the Wolf. Like those things could. So the way my book works is to suggest. Following, um, decades of really, really vital scholarship. I mean, back to Edmund Morgan, American slavery, American freedom, that slavery is not incidental to Liberty.

[00:18:32] Jill Lepore: It is in fact. The world’s first modern democracy arises in the last bastion of chattel slavery because enslaving other human beings fully depriving them of their Liberty and indeed down to their lives for the sake of exerting holy arbitrary power over other human beings. Causes people to think differently about the nature of Liberty and it’s a brutal truth, right?

[00:19:01] Jill Lepore: It’s, it’s, it’s grotesque. It is a horror to imagine that it is the fact of these Virginia planters, you know, Jefferson among them Washington, among them Madison, among them who come to hold Liberty deer because they have so deprived. Right. Other human beings of it. So you can’t just do a sidebar there.

[00:19:23] Jill Lepore: Like the, the one is a cause of the, of the other and, and, but, and yet it doesn’t end, right? Like it keeps rolling because the, then the fact of that advocacy for Liberty and the struggle for independence generates and strengthens and fuels and amplifies voices of abolitionism and makes possible emancipation ultimately, right.

[00:19:44] Jill Lepore: Mm-hmm . So you ha you, they they’re constantly in intention with one another. You can’t, it, it, it’s just a very weird thing that there are history books out there that, you know, wanna have the animating force, like what causes change, right. Just one thing. Like it can’t be it when actually it’s, it’s a, it there’s just a lot going

[00:20:05] Jeremi: on.

[00:20:05] Jeremi: Right, right. Exactly.

[00:20:07] Zachary: One of the things I think you were just acknowledging there is, is sort of the, the, the, the vastness of American history, the ways in which we have these, these many, many causes and the many, the many effects and certainly American history can seem. Vast when we have it in a middle school textbook, that’s a thousand pages long, but how do we get, uh, Americans to understand how small our history is in the span of the world?

[00:20:28] Zachary: And, and how do we, how do we get Americans to understand that that the United States is still a relatively new project, right? One that where creativity and, and iteration is still I, if not possible, uh, needed and, and required. Mm-hmm .

[00:20:42] Jill Lepore: Yeah, no, that’s a beautiful sentiment. And I wish I felt that it were within the realm of the possible, at this moment.

[00:20:50] Jill Lepore: I mean, I do. I do think that, um, I mean, you might wonder to yourself did landing on the moon, which you think you would’ve thought could imbue humanity and Americans who funded in fact, went on that voyage with a kind of newfound sense of awe and wonder at the smallness of us within the vastness of the universe.

[00:21:13] Jill Lepore: But it could go the other way, too. Right. There could be just this incredible. Well then of course there would be a celebration in fact, was of the technological feat and, and scientific advances that made that journey possible. Um, that that could have a kind of icky. Triumphalism a kind of. Um, we’ve now won the cold war because we got first to the moon.

[00:21:37] Jill Lepore: Like there could be this kind of way in which the beauty and majesty of that act becomes diminished by the kind of CD political maneuvering of it. All right. And it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be both. Right. So, I mean, you could think that what that sense of, um, humility and awe and wonder as against all of human history.

[00:22:00] Jill Lepore: You almost would expect that the daily number of climate catastrophes around the world would bring that home in a way. It gives us a sense of scale, right. Of the scale of species on earth of the number of species on earth of our place among other species. Um, but I, I don’t see that happening, right. Like I think.

[00:22:24] Jill Lepore: climate becomes another thing to win, um, at the, you know, well that it’s a matter of national security. We should, in fact, now invest in cl you know, the, the language with which it’s going to be cloaked is going to be one that comes very close to a kind of, I think, kind of ugly version of nationalism. Um, so I guess.

[00:22:42] Jill Lepore: I love the idea behind your question, but I don’t think that can be found in history. I think that is a matter of faith and the sacred and how we live our lives as humans. And I don’t think there’s a mandate from the past of any country or any people that can answer that. And in some ways you could argue looking at a history, that’s seeking that in the history of a particular group who will always lead only to bad things.

[00:23:07] Jeremi: You know, it’s interesting. You say that. I, I read your book slightly differently, but of course I was reading in it what I wanted to read, I guess. Uh, but, uh, I was, I was looking back through it on the plane last night as I was flying back to Austin. And, um, what struck me is that, uh, in a sense, this is your most, I think your most political of all your books, I’m a political historian.

[00:23:29] Jeremi: I usually don’t think of you as a political historian and here you are poli writing a wonderful political. That’s what I would call this political history of the United States. And, um, you have it every moment from the founding forward, you have beauty and ugliness mm-hmm , uh, again, back to the American revolution you capture.

[00:23:47] Jeremi: I think so. Well, the, the, the world of, of Edmond Morgan and popular sovereignty, the invention of popular sovereignty, you capture that, right? You capture the, the idealism, but I think you say at some point, right, it’s two revolutions and one lose. The revolution against slavery, even though slaves, you say are leaving the plantation at this time, they’re flee to the British side.

[00:24:06] Jeremi: Right. Um, and, and I think throughout, and, and so I came away thinking, well, we shouldn’t be surprised that today we have the, the beauty of the largest peaceful movement, uh, in our society for racial justice. After the killing of George Floyd, more, more people were protesting peacefully, more white people than ever before in our society.

[00:24:27] Jeremi: But at the same time, we see a resurgence of antisemitism of racism, of all these things. Mm-hmm um, and, and it sort of, it sort of was a little comforting for me. Maybe it shouldn’t have been that we sort of in a cycle we’ve been been in for a long

[00:24:40] Jill Lepore: time, you know, it’s interesting. It’s so interesting. You say that because when the book came out, which was in 2018, I got a really weird and revealing.

[00:24:51] Jill Lepore: And quite common email from, you know, just every few days, every few weeks saying I’ve just finished your book. And I just can’t understand how you were able to write it so fast since Trump was elected and explain everything about how Trump came to power. You know, when I read Stephen Douglas saying, you know, our government was founded by white men for white men and they’re descendants for all, for all poster.

[00:25:15] Jill Lepore: I, you know, I was amazed that you had been able to find that so quickly in order to explain to me the origins of, of, of Trumpism and what like is a thousand page book lady. Like, I didn’t write it since 2016. Like, like this is like lecture material I was giving in 1992. Right. You know what I mean? Like it’s a compilation of anything I’ve ever read or said it’s cumulative as all of our books, right?

[00:25:38] Jill Lepore: Yeah. Um, But I would also hear people in, in, in, I would also, I would sort of say when I would go give talks and I would kind of tell this story, I’d say, like, when I started writing the book, when I laid it out an outline, I always planned to end. I figured the book would come out around 2019 and I always planned to end with Obama’s inauguration, uh, in 2009.

[00:26:00] Jill Lepore: It’s a beautiful moment. It was a beautiful day. It’s a lovely ending for a book about American history. Um, it was gonna be a beautiful scene to set and it would be like, , you know, the curtain closes and people are weeping on, on the mall in the end. Like I, right. It’s a fairy tale. And I knew that by the time the book came out, the election of 2016 was gonna have happened.

[00:26:21] Jill Lepore: But like everybody else, it seemed like from the polls that hill Hillary Clintons gonna win. I don’t really care like that. Wasn’t gonna attack on a. A a chapter about Hillary Clinton. I like, I had nothing to say about that. And you would not, you know, as a historian really wanna be commenting on the very recent past typically.

[00:26:36] Jill Lepore: So I was like, okay, that’ll be comfortable. It’ll book come out 2019. It’ll be writing about an event it’ll end in 2009, at least be 10 years in the past comfortable. And then Trump was elected and I, and I had decided to scramble. I realized like I needed to write an, an additional chapter that got to election day 2016.

[00:26:53] Jill Lepore: There’s the last thing in the world I wanted to do, right. Try to explain like Trumpism when no one really still understands it analytically in a deep and meaningful way that can be persuasive to everybody. Um, and it’s, it’s a tough ending. It is a tough ending to end on election day, but that seemed to me clear, it would be like a delict of professional duty not to include that, you know?

[00:27:16] Jill Lepore: Yeah. The book would come out and people would like. She must just love Obama. She ended in 2009, like why’d she not cover Trump? And I’m like that, that would be the thing. The only thing people would say about the book, like after all that work. Right, right. Um, the textbook edition is finally coming out. Oh, now, and it ends.

[00:27:35] Jill Lepore: Guess where it ends Zachary

[00:27:37] Zachary: 2009? No.

[00:27:39] Jeremi: Earlier January 6th, 2021. It

[00:27:43] Jill Lepore: ends at the interaction.

[00:27:44] Jeremi: Yeah. Yeah. That’s where my new book starts

[00:27:46] Jill Lepore: actually. Yeah, that’s it. But how, you know, like it’s a moment, it’s the moment it’s like you, it’s a culmination of some, you know, carried forward a little bit. Yeah. Um, that’s where you have to go.

[00:27:55] Jill Lepore: It’s really also really tough.

[00:27:57] Jeremi: You, you have a wonderful paragraph in your epilogue, uh, that I I’ve read and reread many times. Um, it’s near the very end, the truths on which the truths on which the nation was founded, equality, sovereignty, and consent, which are sort of themes that run through the book. Uh, those are, these truths had been retold after the civil.

[00:28:18] Jeremi: Modern liberalism came out of that political settlement and the United States abandoning isolationism had carried that vision to the world. This echoes themes we’ve covered in, in many of our podcasts, the rule of law, individual rights, democratic government, open borders and free markets. The fight to make good on the promise of the nation’s founding truths held the country together for a century during the long struggle for civil rights.

[00:28:43] Jeremi: And yet the nation came apart all the same, all over. Is that still your diagnosis as a historian for where we are?

[00:28:52] Jill Lepore: Yeah. Yeah, man. It’s only getting worse. Do you think it, I mean, it’s worse from 2016. Don’t know is probably when I

[00:28:59] Jeremi: wrote that, I don’t know. Zachary, what do you think is our history getting worse?

[00:29:03] Zachary: I, I don’t

[00:29:04] Jeremi: know. Are we coming apart?

[00:29:06] Zachary: Um, I don’t think so. I think we’ve, I think we’ve, we’ve probably been apart for a long time. Mm-hmm but, um, I, I think it’s interesting, uh, you, you talk in there about, um, the, the power of, uh, the United States as an ideal, if not a, a reality, um, or, or as a, a journey if not a, a, a.

[00:29:27] Zachary: And, and actually attainable, um, goal. Um, I wonder is, is there an argument to me made that, that, that maybe our, our, our founding was a different moment? Uh, maybe it was, maybe it was, uh, simply a unique to the, uh, a sort of unique historical moment that, that didn’t necessarily have the philosophical or the, um, uh, or the, uh, governmental, uh, impact worldwide that we maybe project onto it.

[00:29:55] Zachary: Uh, today. From the lens of 2022, I’m thinking particularly, I think one of your, um, colleagues in the new Yorker, Adam Gopnik, uh, wrote a piece a few years ago. I think it was 2017 about, uh, sort of comparing actually the Canadian system to the United States. And, uh, and, and sort of asking if you compare the, um, The the, um, the sort of multi, the ideal of a, of a multiracial or at least, um, uh, popular sovereignty, uh, based government in Canada, the United States, maybe the, um, Canadian system actually better embodies those ideas.

[00:30:30] Zachary: I don’t know. That may have been three questions in one. I, I apologize. Yeah,

[00:30:33] Jill Lepore: no, you know, I can buy that. I can be persuaded of that. Yeah. I mean, I, I do think. Founding a country on the idea of natural rights and the consent of the government is an extraordinary act in human history. And when commentators at the time, you know, said, there’s, you know, there was the, the creation of the earth and there was when Christ came to earth and, you know, then there was the discovery of the Americas by Europeans.

[00:30:57] Jill Lepore: And then there was the founding of the world’s first modern. What became the world’s first modern like that. These are the of mean events, like that’s the epic chronicler of the 19th century. And, and. Self satisfied, um, celebrations. So I would nowhere go that far and I wouldn’t, that would not be my list about the signal events in the history of humankind, but it is a huge event that does it mean that, um, does it, does it follow that the experiment conducted here is the one that has gone the best?

[00:31:28] Jill Lepore: Absolutely not. Right. You know, that just doesn’t follow and there are really great comparisons. I, a scholar, I really admire immensely Jamal green, who teaches at Columbia law school. He once did this sort of interesting us Canadian comparison, which was, he was really interested in why Americans were so easily persuaded by the jurisprudence of originalism.

[00:31:49] Jill Lepore: The idea that there is a kind of original meaning to the constitution and we need to be faithful to it. Right. It’s like, that’s such a weird idea. Um, so he looked at other former British colonies that have written constitutions. So we compared the us Canada, Australia, um, Oh, yeah. Mainly them. And did like looked at all these different indices, like, I don’t know, income, inequality, literacy rates, like what, what could maybe account for this real difference?

[00:32:17] Jill Lepore: And it, it was the, the percentage of the population that were, that was evangelical Protestants that, that, that form of fundamentalism, a fundamentalist reading of a text as scripture yeah. Is really. Is just very widely diffused in our culture. Even among those of us who are not evangelical Protestants, we live in a world of evangelical Protestantism.

[00:32:36] Jill Lepore: And so it seems, it seems just very natural. It was kind of like an easy sell to convince Americans. Which really only happened since the 1970s, that, that the constitution needs to needs to work that way. And Canada doesn’t have that. Right. And when you don’t have this burden on your back carrying this incredible weight of this, unamendable, you know, unchangeable constitution where, you know, we have this weird deformity with the Supreme court.

[00:33:00] Jill Lepore: You have, you have a capacity for kind of a pluralist politics, uh, a kind of harmonious politics. Sure. That we just, we just

[00:33:07] Jeremi: completely laugh. Sure. We have a priest. That restricts that they just wear black robes of a different kind. So, uh, final question, Jill, it’s the question we, we ask every week, uh, to our various wonderful guests.

[00:33:19] Jeremi: Uh, what should we take away for the, from this, especially our young listeners. On on how history can help them navigate our democratic future. Assuming that we all believe, uh, you point out in the book, not everyone has always believed this, but I think we all believe at least rhetorically in democracy.

[00:33:36] Jeremi: Uh, and I think you and I, in particular and Zachary, because we all love history and we’ve devoted ourselves to what we believe that history somehow enriches our understanding of democracy. What would you hope that your young readers and listeners are taking from your work to help them enrich their democratic.

[00:33:52] Jeremi: Yeah. Well, I,

[00:33:53] Jill Lepore: I, I would hope that people could think of history as an ocean where instead of, you know, dropping in a line and trying to catch the fish that supports the view you already have and throwing all the other fish back in that you can just go sail and explore that it is, it is a world open to discovery.

[00:34:10] Jill Lepore: Um, there will be serious storms out there. There will be beautiful sunrises out there. There will be buffeting winds and there will be gentle winds, but it is not there to justify your position in the world. It is, it is actu people lived and died and they suffered and they endured and they are gone and you can honor them best by appreciating the complexity of their lives and not using them as, as political tools.

[00:34:38] Jeremi: Zachary. What do you

[00:34:39] Zachary: think? I think that’s very powerful. I, I think maybe that’s what we need as a country right now is, is an acknowledgement, uh, that, that we are all shaped by things, uh, as a society and, and, and collectively, uh, that, that we didn’t choose, uh, that, that, that, that we had no say in, um, but that continue to define our lives and.

[00:34:55] Zachary: And maybe that, that is the humility we need and, and that’s the humility we’re missing. Mm-hmm

[00:34:59] Jeremi: mm-hmm and I love the metaphor of sailing at sea. It’s an adventure and, and the winds are taking you in directions. You don’t expect, I, I think of your, your writing in that way. I mean, what’s so beautiful about your writing.

[00:35:10] Jeremi: Jill is. You go from wonder woman to Ben Franklin’s, uh, sister to, um, John Winthrop. Who’s in here. Uh, you, you, you cover so much territory following, as you say that the different wins of the evidence and the stories. And, and I think there’s a lot we can take from as there’s a humility and, and an appreciation I think, of, of those around us, um, that doesn’t make you optimistic.

[00:35:34] Jill Lepore: Uh, no, I’m sorry. I don’t have a lot of autism to offer, but I it’s just what just to say, be a sea,

[00:35:40] Jeremi: be a seagull. Well, this has been a fascinating and wonderful conversation. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you both Zachary. Thank you for your poem and thank you. Most of all, to our loyal listeners for joining us, uh, for this week of this is democracy.

[00:36:02] Jeremi: This podcast is produced by the liberal arts, its development studio and the college of liberal arts at the university of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris codini. Stay tuned

[00:36:15] Jeremi: for a new episode every week. You

[00:36:17] Jeremi: can find this is democracy on apple podcasts, Spotify,

[00:36:21] Jeremi: and Stitcher.

[00:36:22] Jeremi: See you next time.