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.
