​Jill Lepore: These Truths

(Applause)

JILL LEPORE:
Good evening. I'm going to give

a brief slideshow before Eric and I sit
down to talk about American American

history for a little while. I wanted to
do something in the spirit of the graphics

of this year's amazing humanities festival
And I want to talk a little bit about why

I wrote a book about American history
and one reason is our politics consist of

brief historical arguments from the right
and left. We make arguments between the

relationship between the past and the
present, between the present and the

future, how we oppose arguments, make
counter arguments about these two things

and I often find myself sympathetic
with this one very powerful Graphic that

I came across at a tea party rally

(Laughter)

in Washington, D.C.

But what I tried to do in a very brief
presentation this evening is to give you

some sense of why I think it's important
that we abandon those ideological

partisan arguments in favor of a longer
sweeping account of the nation's past and

try to get our bearings back.

So what I want to do is show you a series

of images of America,
of the place that we inhabit.

We could recall that all peoples and all
places represent themselves graphically

on pieces of paper and this is
an Aztec map of the world

or this Algonquin map of the reign of
Powhatan and the 30 tributary

villages that paid tribute to
him here rendered

of Powhatan, the man, the spirit that he
guides on the other side

and these circles of tributary villages.
Europeans before 1492 pictured the world

this way as divided into three parts,
Europe, Africa and Asia, that

were inhabited by the three descendants
of the three sons of Noah, after Columbus

made his voyage in 1492, There was
a lot of work for map makers

had to figure out how to
represent the world differently

and the most famous of these
and most ambitious

is this map by Martin Waldsemuller
who offered up the late

breaking news that he had to adjust his
map to account for the rounding of

Cape of Good Hope
(laughter)

but he wanted to indicate the
fourth part of the world.

If the world has always been three
parts before and now it's four.

What are you going to do with this
fourth part of the world?

No one really knew how to represent it

He was really influenced by a book he read
he put Vespucci on the map, but no one

had no idea what to call this but he
named it America and this is the first

time this land mass is called America.
It of course appears under that name

in many other times and places down to our
day and Vespucci gets a leading credit

in the representation of America.
Vespucci is awakening a sleeping America,

America, a naked native woman.
You should think of him as the

Harvey Weinstein of the age of discovery.
(Laughter)

This is essentially a celebration of
Europeans raping America, planting their

seed in this fertile land. This is a very
different image of Queen Elizabeth,

resting her hand on a globe,
covering North America with her palm

at a time when England has no colonies.
This is a purely ambitious portrait but

bear in mind we'll come across one pretty
similar. This will be familiar to you

as the famous wood cut that appeared in
Franklin's newspaper,

the Pennsylvania Gazette,
arguing that the mainland colonies should

form a defensive union.
This was also a map.

A dissected snake as a map.
At a time when the first jigsaw maps

were invented they were called
dissected maps

and they were made by map makers to try to
teach about the political boundaries

that were the fictions of nation states,
cut maps with a jigsaw and sold them

as puzzles.This is something that Franklin
is calling upon here, the idea that a land

can be cut up and
not just owned by also cut up.

Here is another image of rape, America
being raped by British tax collectors

in 1774. This is a political cartoon.
The Constitution of the United States is

itself a graphical representation of the
relationship between the people in the

places of the people and founded in a
document by the founding of the early

republic this figure appears, liberty, now
not a naked native woman by a clothed

European American woman with her
liberty cap and this white gown.

This image is an indictment of the
hypocrisy of liberty in a land of slavery

and introduces another iconic figure who
appears again and again,

who is this woman. An enslaved African
woman representing allegorically slavery

as against this woman, Liberty.

You see that woman all the time. Here she
is again as Sally Hemings, an African

American woman who was enslaved
by Thomas Jefferson.

Here is a philosophic cock
(laughter)

This is a political cartoon from 1804.
The year of his reelection campaign.

Notice how Hemings is serving
as an allegory for America.

This image from 1848 is an incredibly
powerful representation, celebration of

American democracy, all these white men on
this porch of the American hotel can vote.

They're reading the political news or
having it read to them, the war news from

Mexico and they represent American
diversity at that moment.

You may laugh at this but this is actually
a celebration of diversity.

They're rich and poor, native, immigrant,
city bred, country folks, bankers, farmers

it's an incredible celebration, nowhere
else in the world can all white men

vote except in the American hotel but it's
also an illustration of the limitations

that. Notice this white woman leaning out
the window trying to listen to the

political news. 1848 is the year of
the first woman's rights convention

And then see these figures here,
this black man and his son

or daughter who are dressed in such
a way to suggest they're enslaved.

They're not allowed on the porch either.
The porch is rotting as you might notice.

But note too these two figures, they're
the ones in red, white and blue.

A really interesting commentary on the
limits of American's political community.

This image from the pre Civil War era
should be familiar to you as our

electoral college map.
(Laughter.)

Which is essentially what it is, it is the
electoral college map of the 1850s.

It's the first time that
notion of dissecting,

these are also sold as jigsaw puzzles
as dissected electoral map,

showing the free states including
California, the slave states

and then the unorganized territories here
but considering the country in this way,

picturing the way the nation is
divided is still with us.

Here's Sojourner Truth, a great
abolitionist making her own claim

about the United states, take a minute
to see it but if you follow this scane,

Maine, Florida, Texas.

(audience realization)
(Laughter)

She's making this very powerful claim.
She made this country.

This is her country.
She made it.

You get of course these familiar iconic i
mages of manifest destiny,

now liberty flying across the continent
and celebrating the Western conquest

of Europeans. At the same time there are
forms of criticism like in this political

cartoon, decrying the first immigration
restriction law in 1881, restricting

Chinese immigrants here, the Chinese
are taking down their great wall,

only to have the stones used to build a
wall at the Western border of the

United States by previous ethnic groups
who had already entered the country.

The Statue of Liberty also from that era
on the East Coast represents a different

vision of American immigration.
These dissected maps, these political maps

that you can do as jigsaw puzzles are
widely sold in the 1880s.

Here's a box top where you have liberty
and America kind of together in this

schizophrenic representation of the two.
American folk art communicates the

idea of America. Here's a
suffrage quote that was used to

raise money for the suffrage campaign.
Populism has its graphic representation.

Often a very contemptuous representation
by eastern magazine writers here

representing populism as a balloon
made of raggedy patches, so full of

hot air, primitive and pathetic.
(Laughter)

Plutocrats their iconic representation
especially in a game of monopoly but here

in this magazine where a this guy is
stealing a piggy bank from a toddler.

(Laughter)

The idea of America as a woman, liberty as
a key icon graphic form of political

cartoon of the suffrage movement.
Here the woman, America, is breaking off

her bonds as women struggle for the
right to vote.

There's also a lot of anxiety by the
progressive era about mass democracy

in an age of mass production and the
anonymity in these large numbers of

immigrants who have come to the
United States and how they have to be

assimilated into ways here.
It leads to the immigration restriction

act of 1924, the national origins act
which is advocated for here with this

image we no longer use, this allegory
of the filter rather than the wall.

America as a superpower finds its place in
American comic books by the 1840s,

Captain America 1940, Wonder Woman, 1941.
At the same time as the United States has

failed to wrestle with the problems of
racial inequality after emancipation with

the institution of Jim Crow, which
by 1941, depicted here in this beautiful

Jacob Lawrence portrait, a very
different kind of manifest destiny,

a different kind of continental vision,
the greatest migration in American history

the millions of African Americans who
packed their bags and left the

Jim Crow South for other parts
of the United States.

America's ambitions as a super power
but particularly its role as a leader of

the free world is really very beautifully
represented here. Just like a nice

counterpoint to that Queen Elizabeth
remember she had her hand on the globe?

the empirical conquest that
England imagined at that time.

Here is FDR's vision of the United Nations
with the atlas-like burden that he

expected the United States to bear in
ensuring open markets, open borders,

a democratic world order.
And self determination in 1942.

Something that would be achieved in part
by what FDR called of course the

arsenal of democracy, America's tremendous
military might but what also came out

of that war was the mainframe computer
which would also represent the American

people graphically in what comes out of a
computer printer. This is Walter Cronkite

up here looking like Errol Flynn very
dashing the election of 1952 in which

a computer was used to predict the
outcome, this is live election night

coverage of the campaign of 1952.

This notion that the American people
would be carried on the shoulders of

scientists here are MIT engineers
wrestling with computer printouts

in 1957 the age of Sputnik.
The dawn of our STEM era.

a very particular vision of what an
American super power must have.

Tremendous concern about that anonymity,
the data aggregation, how we are being

reduced to bits and bytes of information
is expressed in that resistance to that

vision by some incredibly
beautiful works of art.

Among them this beautiful
Jasper Johns map from 1961

Those traditional representations graphic
representations of the United States

become central to American political
protests during the Vietnam War.

Here's a powerful silk screen from 1970
and they also are part of our bumper

sticker partisanship that really
begins in the 1970s in earnest,

even as that is resisted by the
environmental movement,

which adopts this blue marble photograph
as its central icon.

The bicentennial elicits a whole new wave

of celebration and also refiguring
of the American vision.

Here's this beautiful piece of folk art,
a quilt by an African American quilter

from Alabama.

Even before the rainbow coalition
or the gay pride flag that has this vision

of the flag as a rainbow,
really powerful one.

We also, I think, would be ill advised
to overlook influence of social science

representations of the American people
as the inhabitants of a place as a nation.

Here's a really interesting representation
of the American people from the

Second World War
to more or less now,

I'm just going to suggest to you,
I showed this mainly to suggest to you

this is the way we think about
ourselves but this is a chart that is

tracking two things. Political
polarization which is really low

until about 1972 and has been rising
and income inequality, which was very low.

This is the GI Bill in the decades
following the Second World War

and has been rising.The relationship
between these two curves

is something we can talk about
during the Q and A.

In the dawn of the opening of the Internet
to commercial traffic in the 1990s,

Wired Magazine celebrated that opening
and insisted that all the problems that

represented in this graph would be
solved by the Internet.

(Laughter)
I know, which is laughable now.

A lot of that vision that you
technologically utopianism was criticized.

Here is this beautiful installation,
it's as big as this stage,

this map of the United States,
and each state is comprised of

video screens and monitors.
They are broadcasting and blaring

something about their own state.
There's multiple screens in each state

and no matter how close you get or
how far away you get, you can hear

everything but you can understand nothing.
The whole point of this beautiful work

by the Korean American artist
named June Paik, is with the Internet,

we are all broadcasting
but no one is listening.

So again I just wanted to suggest
to you briefly that it is a very quick

tour through some powerful graphic
representations of the idea of America.

How much our political history mobilized
for the sake of political argument but

how much is gained by looking at that
argument over time and how so many

things that seem unprecedented including
the idea of a wall subject to the powerful

protest are in fact precedent.
Think about that electoral map

and how it haunts us and divides us.
Think about where that comes from

and who is making a lot of
money actually by broadcasting it

more or less constantly.

So I would just close, as Eric and I begin
our conversation by pointing I think to

one of my most favorite pieces of public
art representing the current,

I guess one of the questions that came in,
the current national nightmare,

as that was phrased,
is this neon sculpture by the

African American artist Glen Logan
called "Double America"

one of the series that he produced a few
years back. I think attempting to ask us

to think about how we can live in a
place where to some people, up is down.

Thanks very much.

(Applause)

ERIC SLAUTER:
That was great. It was fun to sit in the

wings and hear the laughter.

(Laughter)

I think this is a very fun book to
read and congratulations on its

publication, and now what seems
to be a very good reception.

We're here at Northwestern today,
and the book is long.

It's an 800, 900 page book.

JILL LEPORE:
200 pages are footnotes.

ERIC SLAUTER: That's right.
(Laughter)

JILL LEPORE:
And there's a lot of illustrations.

ERIC SLAUTER:
One page for every member of the audience.

(Laughter)
But who's counting?

Northwestern is mentioned twice in the
book and so I thought we'd start there.

(Laughter)

JILL LEPORE:
It's like a quiz.

Okay. I'm trying to remember.

ERIC SLAUTER:
The first time is in your chapter on

reformers and citizenship after the
Civil War and you invoke Francis Willard,

who was the head of the women's Christian
temperance union and a dean here at

Northwestern and her slogan was
"do everything."

So often in reviews of this book,
theres a sense of the incredible audacity

of trying to do all of American history
within a single compass

or within a single book.

So can you talk about whether
"do everything"

is a good slogan for this book or not?
(Laughter)

JILL LEPORE:
I can see that it was audacious,

but I by no means did everything.
It's a very selective account in the sense

that it's my sense it's my obligation in
my book or any book to organize my

discoveries so they can be rendered
not only comprehensible to but ideally

delightful to a reader.
I'm a believer in delight.

Delight can mean sorrow.
It doesn't mean a book is going to

make you happy. I'm not going to promise
the book is going to make you happy,

but that so there's a lot of
decisions behind doing it.

So, yes, do everything in the sense
that it would be important.

I thought it was important for
someone to sit down and try to write a

book like this,
to try to do it in a fair minded

and broad minded and scholarly way
but that was really devoted to capturing

and maintaining a reader's interest.

ERIC SLAUTER:
The second reference to Northwestern

is to a professor of journalism here
in the early 1930s, who left in 1932 for

Princeton where he developed a laboratory
that involved the measuring of

public opinion and is sort of known
to be the father of political polling

and that's George Gallup a professor,
I think at Medill in the 1930s.

You don't take all that much delight in
George Gallup, I think,

or in political polling in general,
and so do you want to say,

is Gallup one of your antagonists
in the larger story?

This is very much a book about the
collision as you were saying at the

end between politics and
versions of social science.

JILL LEPORE:
Yeah. I think that Gallup is not a bad man

or something, and I don't have any sense
of Gallup as a man. But as a salesman,

what he was selling I think came out
of a very good intention in the 1930s

to think about how to resist fascism
and fascism is when the state tells

people what to believe.

Gallup believed that he could use
some of the same tools that is largely

the tools of social science.
The best social science was coming

out of Germany and those tools could
be used to help democracy look better

by amplifying the voice of the people
so that elected officials could listen

to it better,

they could know the will of people better,
but if fascism is about amplifying

the voice of political leaders,
that polling would be about amplifying

the voice of the people
and that's the spirit in which

he undertakes it, and markets it
"America Talks" is the name of his

syndicated newspaper column.

There are a few different problems of what
Gallup is doing that have been pointed

out by many people from the very start
of when so-called scientific polling began

that are just generally set aside with
each generation, and it really bothers

me that they're set aside.

So one is that Gallup didn't actually
measure the opinions of the American

people. He measured the opinions to the
degree that he could have people that he

believed would vote, so for instance he
routinely did not poll blacks in the South

because under Jim Crow it would
be very difficult for them to vote.

He routinely did not poll about civil
rights questions because he had a national

syndication and southern newspapers
said if he asked about civil rights they

wouldn't run his column anymore,
so he claimed to have this incredible

mandate of the people that
he is offering to the public,

telling people what people believe,
and it's riddled with all kinds of

problems that are propagating existing,
and actually exacerbating existing

political inequalities,
and then the other thing

that I spend some time about on the
subject in the book, is that the premise

behind the kind of polling that
we do now rests on a misunderstanding

of how our government works.
We don't have delegates

The people we elect to go to Congress
don't do what we tell them to do.

They're there to represent our interests,
and pollsters would seem to suggest

that what we're asking people to do is do
what we tell them to do.

We live in an incredibly,

I don't know what the
adjectival form of plebiscite is,

but people would vote on an issue what
is tended to be trending on Twitter,

that's actually the opposite of how
our government is set up.

ERIC SLAUTER:
We've satisfied the local questions.

JILL LEPORE:
Okay

ERIC SLAUTER:
And now we can talk much more

about the book, but I wanted to give you
a chance to sort of show the way in

which this is really a book full of
biographies of different individuals.

So you began your career as a
historian of a little known war

that I don't think many people in the
audience may have heard of,

JILL LEPORE:
Show of hands King Phillips war?

(light applause)

JILL LEPORE:
Little known. You're right.

(Laughter)

ERIC SLAUTER:
Readers of your book will only hear about

it in I think a single sentence..so
(Laughter)

JILL LEPORE:
It's of little significance.

ERIC SLAUTER:
No, no. no

But I guess I wanted to ask you

how you went from being a historian
of a little known war that

few had heard of, and you were
really more of a historian

of the discourse around the war,
and sort of the ways in which that

ran through U.S. history up
through the present.

But how did you prepare
yourself to do this?

I've read or heard interviews where
you talk about working chronologically,

checking out the books, so what was
the process of writing a book like this?

JILL LEPORE:
Well, I wouldn't have been able

to write this book ten or certainly
not 20 years ago or whenever it

was that I wrote that book about
King Phillips, the dissertation was the

first book I wrote in the middle of the
1990s, and ever since then I've been

teaching American history
and also writing essays

and I want to emphasize that
because the teaching which

broadens your scope, because
you're not only responsible for what

you're teaching but what people ask you.
I've been writing for the New Yorker

since 2005 and very early on I went to
meet my editor, who I only knew by email

to sayI'd really like more work,
I love this kind of work,

I have a big appetite for it.
I won't turn down anything,

but I am in the
17th century American story.

ERIC SLAUTER:
It opens a lot of doors.

JILL LEPORE:
You'd be surprised how little interest..

(Laughter)

JILL LEPORE: So he said would you
write about the 18th century?

And I said I think I can do that safely.
What about the 19th century?

So this sort of emerged that if I
wanted to write for a general

interest magazine I needed to
be willing to write all about

American history and academic speciality
and I think it turns out as a fellow

early Americanist, I'm hoping you
might agree with this supposition,

but I think if I had been
trained and if my work

is about 1968 to the present and
then I started something in 1492,

it would have been a disaster,
trying to write those essays,

trying to do a good book about
the 16th century.

It's harder to do the work in the
early period, the language is different,

the archive is scant, the material
is more difficult to work with,

the world is more foreign,
so the closer the more you move

chronologically in time toward
the present, I think the easier it gets.

You don't see a lot of
people who start out,

whose first book was a biography
of Ronald Reagan who go on to do

something that has big
chronological work is difficult.

Or most of the popular biographies
that you read are actually written

not by historians but by journalists
anyway who couldn't do that.

So for me, the easy part of the book
was like up to the Civil War,

and then it gets tricky.

The process was just like, okay,
write the chapter outline and

then figure out a list of books
I need for each chapter,

order them from the library,
put them in a stack, chapter one,

chapter two, chapter three,
read them, send them back to the library,

read the next file, it's that.

(Laughter)

ERIC SLAUTER:
It's heroic.

(Laughter)

JILL LEPORE:
It was a lot.

I took a picture of the books once,
because my editor was like

how is the book coming along?
I'm over here. I got to get there.

(Laughter)

ERIC SLAUTER:
So one thing that I love about this book,

even as a professional historian, it's
not obsessed with the history of history,

or historiography, but it is
obsessed with historians as

characters in this book,
and there are many times when you will

turn and reflect upon one of your
progenitors, whether it's

George Bancroft or Woodrow Wilson,
someone who has the audacity to try

to write a general history of the
United States and historians appear

in each chapter, Richard Hofstetter,
Allen Nevins, Charles and Mary Beard

and I'm curious what you think the role
of the historian should play now

compared to these earlier
versions of public intellectuals.

JILL LEPORE:
Well, I guess I included those people

as characters almost incidentally.
It happens that all of them were indeed

famous for something else.
So George Bancroft..

was the secretary of war.
Woodrow Wilson?

ERIC SLAUTER:
What did he do?

(Laughter)

JILL LEPORE:
Theodore Roosevelt to write the

history of the West.
Franklin Douglas, I think you should be

understood as a historian
but is known as other things.

W.E.B Du Bois, better known for
other things. Charles and Mary beard.

ERIC SLAUTER:
Frederick Jackson turner.

JILL LEPORE:
Turner was merely a historian.

ERIC SLAUTER:
Merely a historian.

(Laughter)

By the way, that itself is
interesting, right?

That those people all they are doing,
by the time of the modern research

university, or the land grant university
in the case of Turner, they are working

as historians, that's what they do,
until you get to Slessinger,

who was famously kicked out of
the department after he went to work

in the Kennedy administration,
because historians weren't supposed to do

something other than be historians.
Mainly those people are in the book

because they are doing other things,
but you can use them as a way to observe

the narrowing of the role of the historian
I don't think that after Hofstetter

there is a historian in my account,
because there isn't anybody after

Hofstetter who is known in
that same way maybe.

So what do I think the role of
the current historian is?

Were doing it, you and I
are doing this right now.

ERIC SLAUTER:
You say in the book it's not to be,

it's not to criticize,
it's not to moralize,

so what is the proper province
of the historian now?

JILL LEPORE:
I will say what I think it is not.

I don't think the proper role of the
historian or the best and most

helpful thing a historian can do is
serve as a political commentator

and that is mostly what we
are called upon to do.

If we are ever called upon to do
anything. I mean generally what happens

(Laughter)

We're judge generally considered

ERIC SLAUTER:
There's 900 people here

JILL LEPORE:
Thank you very much.

That's because they're also going
to be President of the United States,

Wilson and I started out in the academy.

ERIC SLAUTER:
I'll write the inaugural.

JILL LEPORE:
What was I saying?

How we are useless.. OH!

When you see historians,
I'm not going to tell that story.

But when you watch television or
you read the newspaper,

you see basically three historians,
and they come on the stage and they say,

"I have a funny story about FDR."
And they'll say "I have a very

illuminating and dark tale about
LBJ that forebodes our time."

There's some presidential anecdote.
They're like court jesters, and it's not

that they are bad people, but
I think that's a fairly terrifying

use of an intellectual. Right?
We're just there to say

"it's been this bad before,
don't worry," or "oh, my God, worry!"

(Laughter)

As if like that's what we do,
think about training and the method

and the discipline and evidence and
that's just..you can pull anybody

off the street to say that.
Like it's really troubling to me.

So I don't think that is actually the
best role, and I think that in general,

certainly my generation and the generation
that trained me, refused to engage

in any kind of public commentary
because that was so debased and it

had been debased in particular by
Vietnam because during the Vietnam War,

social scientists worked for McNamara
and were working to keep us in Vietnam

as long as we were and there were a lot
of social scientists who were opposed to

Vietnam and were in the protests,
and at the end of it, a lot of scholars

said we should not. We should act as
citizens and as activists or we should

be scholars but it's a mess out there.
And what we say will be demeaned

and simplified, and so when I was being
trained, it was a huge thing that you

should never, like the
specific instruction,

never write an op ed,
never go on the radio,

like you can't do these things
and still be a serious person.

And largely that is unfortunately true
because, not for like the radio,

but certainly on TV, we were just talking
about this earlier, it's very hard to be a

serious person on television. It's not
actually a serious medium right now.

(Laughter)

No one is recording this.

ERIC SLAUTER:
No, no one is recording it

for future broadcast.

So another thing that I really
appreciate about this book,

I think that often when you talk to a
historian and you ask a question and

what was the cause of the Civil War, what
was the cause of the American revolution,

there's usually a sigh, and then,
well, it's pretty complex,

but in this I don't think that you deny
the complexity of American history,

but there is a kind of attention
and clarity, so this is a chance for

us to talk about the three truths
that you identify as the truths

of American history.
You also have to nominate one

question as the animating question that
runs throughout American history and

also through this book. I don't think
people have to buy the book to know what

the question is or what the three..

JILL LEPORE:
But they all want to.

ERIC SLAUTER:
But you didn't mention them so I

wanted to give you a chance to say.

JILL LEPORE:
Yeah, I mean the way I organized the book

was to say that it would be useful
for us to reacquaint ourselves with

the notion that the United States is a
nation founded on a set of ideas.

It is not a nation that is founded on a
shared ethnic heritage or even a shared

language. Not really a shared history.
It's a nation that was founded on a set of

shared ideas that are identified by
Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of

Independence as These Truths that we hold
to be self evident, political equality,

natural rights and the sovereignty
of the people, and if we no longer hold

those ideas in common,
then we actually don't have a nation

anymore. So it's useful to think about
those ideas, and to figure out where

they come from, and are they true.

So the way the book is organized,
sort of a whole long stretch of it is

where did those ideas come from.
They don't come from nowhere.

They don't come from Jefferson.
Where do they come from?

And really the rest of the book is kind of
true and do we still believe them.

that's kind of how the book is organized
and it also asks us to remember that the

unwritten truth is inquiry.
Like actually it is our job in a republic

to figure out what's true.
Inquiry is a foundational American value,

the art of inquiring into the truth
of the matter, that as citizens we

can exercise our suffrage responsibly
and with a public interest in mind

and the United States is therefore and
was understood by its framers and

founders as an enlightenment experiment
as Hamilton says in the federalist paper.

It has fallen upon the people of the
United States to answer this really

intriguing question, if in the whole
history of humanity if it's possible

for people to design a government to
rule themselves justly and as equal

with the exercise of reason
and choice, instead of succumbing

to the fate of every other
government in the history of humanity.

Succumbing to accident and force.
That was a crappy paraphrase.

(Laughter)

ERIC SLAUTER:
It's in the book.

JILL LEPORE:
It is in the book.

But for Hamilton that's the question.
Here's an experiment.

We have this idea, what
if we tried to do this.

No one else has ever succeeded before,
and I avoid answering that question.

I point out moments when people ask
it very explicitly, because it comes up

again and again and again.

ERIC SLAUTER:
I have to cross that one off then.

(Laughter)

JILL LEPORE:
All of my students debate that question

all the time, because it's a good debate,
but the point is, you know when you go

on a long car trip with your kids and it's
like are we there yet, look, we're just

passing through the painted
mountains, isn't that beautiful?

And they're like are we there yet?
No, but it's the journey.

It's the question
It's not the answer.

ERIC SLAUTER:
Yeah.

Well what's nice about that is
that Jefferson gives you your title,

and Hamilton gives you
your animating question.

And that's a very balanced
way, it seems like.

JILL LEPORE:
Yeah. I guess in a partisan sense.

ERIC SLAUTER:
In a partisan sense and we want to

land on partisanship at some point.
But so this is a book that has a lot to

say about religion, which kind
of differentiates it from a lot of single

volume histories, and
a lot of histories out there.

And there's something called the
page 99 test, have you ever done this?

JILL LEPORE:
No.

ERIC SLAUTER:
You open to page 99 and get a good sense

of what the book is about, because
authors often pay more attention to the

introduction or the conclusion.

So can you guess what
you're talking about on page 99?

(Laughter)

JILL LEPORE: I think we haven't got out
of the 17th century yet.

ERIC SLAUTER:
I'll show it to you, here.

JILL LEPORE:
I'm going to fail the page 99 test.

ERIC SLAUTER: No, you can't fail it.
You succeed beautifully.

JILL LEPORE: I think I should get a free
meal at a steakhouse

ERIC SLAUTER:
Read the first sentence on page 99 here.

JILL LEPORE: We hold These Truths
to be sacred and undeniable, Jefferson

(Laughter)
began that all men are created..

Blah, blah, blah

ERIC SLAUTER:
It's a pretty good representation

of what you're going to get, ending at the
bottom of the page with the Jamaican

slave revolt. I think it's a great
passage, so the question is if the

committee of five hadn't revised
Jefferson's original language

from we hold these truths to be sacred and

undeniable to self evident,
what would be the effect have been?

JILL LEPORE:
That's a great illustration of the

contingency of history. It wouldn't
have meant anything to the people

who wrote it but it would have meant
to people in the 19th and 20th century.

One reason there's so much religion
in the book is that you know there's a lot

of religion in American history.
But also it has been pretty aggressively

stripped out of a lot of historical
writing by generations of fairly secular

academic historians, and I wanted to,
you know,I wanted to be part of the

solution to that problem, and so spent
a lot of time thinking about where to

really emphasize the religious
influence on American politics.

It's really a political and intellectual
history so I'm looking for moments

where changes in religious belief or
practice have an effect on

political arrangements.

ERIC SLAUTER:
So most of this is a pacing question,

but most histories of the United States,
most surveys of the United States sort of

break down right at the Civil War,
sort of up to the Civil War is volume one,

and reconstruction and after is
volume two. In a 900 page book,

you're done with the Civil War
at about page 300, which means that the

center of the book ends up
following much later.

ERIC SLAUTER:
Than it does in a lot of histories.

In fact the 1910s, if we would look at
the exact center point, I can show you.

(Laughter)

The exact center point is going
to be the 1912 election,

so about a hundred years ago.

ERIC SLAUTER:
And in fact there's a photograph

of a suffragette parade in New York
on that page. I'll have to find it.

It doesn't really matter.
But I guess I wanted to ask you what

you think the center of American
history is. I think we're going to have

some questions from the audience pretty
soon that they have sent in about the sort

of more recent past.

When you were working your way
through and thinking, am I there yet.

(Laughter)

JILL LEPORE:
When you write a biography and you're

waiting for the person to die?
(Laughter)

It has a little bit of a quality to it.

ERIC SLAUTER:
Did the United States die?

JILL LEPORE:
There's a lingering illness, yeah.

I should explain that I was first asked
by Norton, my publisher to write a college

textbook and I said, sure, I'm happy to
do that, so long as you're willing to

publish a book that is in my voice
and not in the voice of a textbook writer,

and also so long as you're willing to
wait because the reading public needs

this book more. There are plenty of other
college textbooks that are really

different than this book, so I wrote this
book first and actually this summer,

before the book came out, I revised this
book into the textbook and in the textbook

it divides much more half and half at
the Civil War, 'cause they asked for that.

They wanted basically quite a bit more.
They wanted the colonial period divided

into four different sections but writing
it for the general reader, I'm assuming

people really don't want to hear all that
much about William Penn and the founding

of Pennsylvania there were kinds of nods
to key moments there, but I also did want

there to be a lot of momentum.
I wanted the political issues to become

recognizable fairly quickly and that
happens by the Jacksonian period

I would say. So there are,
the textbook looks

quite different. I took out 40,000 words
and I put in 30,000 more words in there,

just differently arranged.
Where do I think the hinge is of

American history? I might choose 1896,
which is pretty close to my 1912 point.

And at a certain point when people teach
the U.S. history survey, which now is

always divided at the Civil War,
I think it should be divided at 1896,

we have a lot to cover from 1896 to
the present, you have to start in 1865,

you never really get past like Reagan or
maybe you don't even get past Vietnam.

There's always a problem. Sort of for
high school kids it's really hard

the way they kind of work that year out.
I think 1896 is a really important moment.

Plessy versus Ferguson, upholding
Jim Crow segregation, it's the election

that realigns the Democratic and
Republican parties, it's the first federal

election. This is a bad thing to say today

but it's the first U.S. federal election
where no one is killed at the polls.

We've had some successful ones since then.

Let's try to keep that record going.
But it's the first election with a secret

ballot nationwide.

ERIC SLAUTER:
So we'll move to the audience questions

in just a second. I wanted to ask
you finally, there's a persistent theme

in the book about what will save
the republic, and Madison thinks it's

going to be the newspaper, and maybe the
age of Lincoln thinks it's going to be the

telegraph, and the age of FDR thinks it's
going to be the radio, and Nixon thinks

it's going to be the television.
And we think it's going to be the Internet

So you kind of give us this little pocket
history of this relationship between

democracy and media.
Saying occasionally that, yes, Madison was

right and yet terribly wrong and
so can you say a little bit about what

made them right and what made them
wrong and maybe ending with the Internet?

JILL LEPORE:
Yeah. I think we forget how much

of our political system is not in the
Constitution but is later adapted.

So including the party system,
including judicial review.

Big things about how we arrange
ourselves politically.

Including the Bill of Rights, which is
not initially in the Constitution.

But what happens very quickly after
the ratification of the Constitution is

that people who are paying attention
above all from Madison realize this

experiment like already it needs
some tinkering. Like it's not quite

working. Like if you're going to
have parties, then, they knew they

were going to have parties they
probably would have arranged the

federal government differently.
They have to figure out what it is,

they have to pass the 12th amendment,
the separation of the vice president and

the presidential election.

So they already are realizing there's
some problems, and because that

realization happens at the moment
of the emergence of technological

determinism and the great age of machines
and the beginning of the industrial

revolution where people are beginning
to think about progress in technological

terms, that Madison is even beginning
to think that way, oh, well, what

will fix this is the newspaper,
because the newspaper will circulate

around the country like blood, and well,
then the country seems to be falling

apart by section, the telegraph will hold
us together. It becomes a habit to think

of a technological patch for a
political problem, which is always

just failing to solve the political
problem. And it just keeps postponing

any real confrontation with the political
problem itself, which is the problem

of disunion. And the only one of those
technologies that I think actually at

least for a while goes some ways
towards solving that problem or at least

mitigating it which is the radio, which
I think is a very unionizing technology

because of the way it's managed by Hoover.
Because of the way that the federal radio

commission was set up in
1927, the federal radio act.

The very opposite is the case with the
Internet, which is organized basically by

anarchists, I mean libertarians would be
at the outside of that anarchist body

of people who decide that the reason
like the reason for PayPal is, you know,

Peter Thiel doesn't believe in government.
He believes that there should be currency

that is outside the control of government.
Like the whole idea behind that early

campaign that led in 1969 that leads to
the telecommunications act that the

internet should be beyond the realm of
government control because it is the

organizing form of communication
for a post governmental world and it turns

out to be only too true.

ERIC SLAUTER:
Well, let's move on to some questions

from the audience.
We have quite a few here and I'm not sure

how many we'll get through.
The first one comes from Kimberly,

and it's a question about how your
perspective on being a historian has

changed over time, some of which we've
talked about, but more particularly what

advice you have for new historians who
are currently in graduate school.

JILL LEPORE:
Good luck.

(Laughter)

Have you thought about law school?

(Laughter)

When I was in graduate school,
I was taught that the very thing that was

very important for you to do, in addition
to not being engaged in public

conversations, was in the classroom,
to abdicate your authority.

This was part of a feminist pedagogy
but it was part of the aftermath of the

student revolution of the 1960s that we
were supposed to facilitate communication

and sit in a circle and get everybody
to speak up, but the last thing we were

supposed to do was to lecture or to
embody our own authority as intellectuals

because this was anti feminist and it was
anti leftist and I for a while kind of

followed that advice, until I realized
that it was the advice that became

prevalent in the academy just when
women and people of color got Ph.D.s.

(Laughter)

And then I thought, how convenient.

(Laughter)

We were all being told to abdicate
our authority and have no public role,

and we were telling ourselves that we
have basically erased ourselves from any

kind of public role that involves
intellectual authority, so my big

determination as a young scholar,
young graduate student even,

was I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to be as audacious as I

possibly can get away with, like my
first book was about this obscure war,

but the sub title of the book is the
origins of American identity,

which people like, how can you say that,
who do you think you are? I don't know.

I got my Ph.D., I can say that.
(Laughter)

I will say my very, very dear colleague,
when I was an assistant professor,

my dear colleague, Bruce Schulman
made a poster for me,

do you remember goldenrod photocopy
paper? On that paper he put it up on the

wall of my office for me, and Bob Dallek,
the presidential historian, Robert Dallek,

lovely man was in our department,
he lived in Washington

and he came up twice a year to
give a lecture when he had an

appointment in our department and
we never saw him but we all liked him,

but Bruce made me this poster
that was a picture of his face,

and it at the top it would be
like “Would Dallek do it?”

and at the bottom " Be like Bob"
It was like a politcal campaign poster.

He said "Jill, whenever anyone asks you
what you are writing about or would

you serve on this committee or will
you run this errand for me,

would Dallek do it?" I just highly
recommend making a

poster for all your junior
powerless colleagues.

ERIC SLAUTER:
This is the anti do everything.

JILL LEPORE:
just, yeah, be like Bob.

ERIC SLAUTER:
Okay. I've been given the sign that we

have about five minutes, so here's an
easy one. Is Trump a political aberration?

(Laughter)

JILL LEPORE:
Yes.

ERIC SLAUTER:
This comes from John.

Is Trump a political aberration,
or putting aside his amoral behavior

and likely indebtedness to Russia,
a lot to put aside, a political norm

in our history?

JILL LEPORE:
Trump is a political aberration,

I mean I guess it depends on who
comes next and after him, whether

he's a new line, but I think he's an
aberration. I wrote a piece for the

New Yorker last month that was super
fun to write, because I was asked

it will seem like a decade ago,
but do you remember when Paul Manafort

(Laughter)

ERIC SLAUTER:
I remember him. It was back in July.

JILL LEPORE:
Okay. This was like three weeks ago.

(Laughter)

I'm not kidding. And who else?
Michael Cohen, whatever,

it was like a few guys.
This is it, it's now so I wrote about

previous administrations where there
were indictments, so I looked around for

crazy people who were indicted, who were
close to the presidents, and they were

some great guys, they were three guys
named Orville and you should be called

an "Orviller" when you do that.
But I came across a citation in a

bibliographic dictionary entry to a
book called presidential misconduct

or something, and I pulled it,
I raced to the library, I was on my bike

and I raced to the library and I pulled it
off the stacks, it hadn't been checked

out except for like twice since 1974 when
it was published and what it was,

in doing Watergate, John Dean in the
Watergate inquiry commission, a lot of

the Republicans said, okay, Nixon has
done all this crap, but we think this is

probably what every president
does, we just don't know that.

So we're not going to be voting for
impeachment unless you can prove

this isn't just politics as usual,
so Dean called up Woodward at Yale,

to compile a report. Maybe it is politics
as usual on what every president who has

ever been accused of anything or
anyone in his administration of doing

something illegal, what happened?
The accusations?

So he called his three best friends
who called five graduate students

and they had a group of 14 historians,
assigned to all the presidents and they

had three weeks to do it and they all
went to a barn in Connecticut and lived

together.This sounds like the
most fun in the world.

(Laughter)

To research everything that any president
had ever been accused of.. fast.

So they wrote this report and they
rushed it down to Washington but then

Nixon resigned.
(Laughter.)

So it wasn't even published with the
Watergate official proceedings because

it never entered the government record
but it was a matter of public record so

Woodward owned the copyright to it so he
got it printed and they printed a bunch

of them but then nobody bought it
'cause after Nixon resigned people said

don't talk to me about
presidential misconduct

So, this is the long answer
to this good question

I called up all the historians who were
still living who had worked on that report

and I said 'cause Woodward wrote this long
introduction who said there's been a lot

of “Orvilling” in American history,
but there's never been this, this, this,

and this which is the things what Nixon
uniquely stands accused of doing and

in fact proven to have done.
So Woodward wrote this anti Nixon thing.

If this had been in the report.
So I called all these guys and I said,

between 1974 and now, What's the
difference now? Because there's been

a lot of shenanigans.I think Bill Clinton
really stands out as a very

bad presidential administration.
In history as well.

ERIC SLAUTER:
And in the book.

JILL LEPORE:
So these guys,

I talked to Bill McFeely who is like 85.
And all these guys were like, no, yeah,

you can kind of respect Nixon.
Like asking them about Trump,

the thing with Nixon is he didn't really
understand the Constitution.

He didn't think it applied to him.
But there was something about a tax

on private citizens in a public forum
that while not unconstitutional is

debasing to American politics.
If you make a list of those things,

and that's what they were just floored by,
you know, you can listen to the Nixon

tapes and he will say dreadful things
about Dan Ellsberg or whatever.

But he's not going calling for political
assassination, essentially.

So yeah, I think we hope that
this is an aberration.

ERIC SLAUTER:
So at the next meeting of the American

historical association will you call
together the most prominent historians

to do an updated version of this?
Of this book.I think people would read it

JILL LEPORE:
Would they?

ERIC SLAUTER: I think it would not sit
in the library. Anyway, thank you so much.

JILL LEPORE:
Thanks a lot.

(Applause)