发表于2025-05-24
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include The Secret History of Wonder Woman, a national bestseller, and Book of Ages, a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history.
Written in elegiac prose, Lepore’s groundbreaking investigation places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. 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, on a fearless dedication to inquiry, Lepore argues, because self-government depends on it. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise?
These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology, from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine, from talk radio to twenty-first-century Internet polls, from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act, from the printing press to Facebook News.
Along the way, Lepore’s sovereign chronicle is filled with arresting sketches of both well-known and lesser-known Americans, from a parade of presidents and a rogues’ gallery of political mischief makers to the intrepid leaders of protest movements, including Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist orator; William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate and ultimately tragic populist; Pauli Murray, the visionary civil rights strategist; and Phyllis Schlafly, the uncredited architect of modern conservatism.
Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. "A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history," Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. "The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden," These Truths observes. "It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it."
These Truths 下载 mobi pdf epub txt 电子书 格式 2025
These Truths 下载 mobi epub pdf 电子书##understood only 60%
评分##1492,1607,1619,1620,1776,这五个四位数出现的话,那就意味着是在讲美国的历史(当然不包括美洲原住民的历史)。 这5个“美国起源”起始点,代表了不同的历史观点,唯一共同点就是欧洲白人要做一个“伟大的国家建设实验”。 当下“1619计划”把黑奴登陆的时间点变成美国的...
评分 评分##一流的非虚构作品,非主流的历史研究杰作,Lepore果然是American Studies培养的学者,风格大开大合,细节描写又令人拍案称奇,现代美国政治就是一出连续不断的肥皂剧,惊悚,荒诞,英雄,悲情,史诗,皆有,暴君,义士,真小人,伪君子,masscult与无力的男性气概共存。美国是一座躁动不安的剧场,流动的盛宴,野心勃勃的试验场。
评分 评分 评分##筆觸與一般歷史書確實不一樣,Jill Lepore非常成功地將歷史上看似相斥的運動融會到大史觀論述當中,節奏拿貼得當。 書中在論述美國如何建國的同時,也談到黑奴反抗、組織反抗團體與諸多不同團體拉扯一起向前的過程。一個民主的國家,自建國之初,就註定會經歷動亂與爭執,而正...
评分 评分##美国的独立宣言和宪法中,没有“上帝”这个词,同时也没有“奴隶”这个词。建国纲领完全是世俗的,对于君主的腐败和贵族的腐败,这些饱读政治历史哲学的精英分子更加害怕“多数人的暴政”。非奴隶州,有财产的显然是少数人;奴隶州,显然奴隶数量远远大于奴隶主。美国的建国是...
These Truths mobi epub pdf txt 电子书 格式下载 2025