Product Description
<p>In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. The American experiment rests on three ideas - "these truths", Jefferson called them - political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, "[O]n a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching", writes Jill Lepore in a groundbreaking investigation into the American past that places truth itself at the center of the nation's history. </p>
<p>In riveting prose, <i>These Truths</i> tells the story of America, beginning in 1492, to ask whether the course of events has proven the nation's founding truths or belied them. </p>
<p>"A nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history", Lepore writes, finding meaning in those very contradictions as she weaves American history into a majestic tapestry of faith and hope, of peril and prosperity, of technological progress and moral anguish. </p>
<p>A spellbinding chronicle filled with arresting sketches of Americans from John Winthrop and Frederick Douglass to Pauli Murray and Phyllis Schlafly, <i>These Truths</i> offers an authoritative new history of a great, and greatly troubled, nation. </p>
