Lepore, Jill. "Baby Doe: a Political History of Tragedy." the New Yorker.

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In the most ambitious, ane-book 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 iii 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, writes Jill Lepore in a groundbreaking investigation into the American past that places truth itself at the center of the nation's history. In riveting prose, These Truths 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. "A nation born in contradiction, freedom in a state of slavery, will fight forever over the meaning of its history," Lepore writes, finding pregnant in those very contradictions as she weaves American history into a majestic tapestry of faith and promise, of peril and prosperity, of technological progress and moral anguish. Part spellbinding chronicle, role sometime-fashioned civics book, These Truths, filled with absorbing sketches of Americans from John Winthrop and Frederick Douglass to Pauli Murray and Phyllis Schlafly, offers an administrative new history of a great, and greatly troubled, nation.

Praise for These Truths

"[B]rilliant…insightful…It isn't until you beginning reading it that yous realize how much we need a book like this one at this detail moment."

—Andrew Sullivan,The New York Times Book Review

"This sweeping, sobering account of the American past is a story not of relentless progress but of conflict and contradiction, with crosscurrents of reason and organized religion, black and white, immigrant and native, manufacture and agriculture rippling through a narrative that is far from completion."

—TheNew York Times Book Review, Editors' Pick

"[Lepore's] one-volume history is elegant, readable, sobering; it extends a steadying manus when a breakneck news bicycle lurches from 1 effect to another, misreckoning minds and churning stomachs."

—Jennifer Szalai,The New York Times

"Jill Lepore is an extraordinarily gifted writer, andThese Truths is cypher short of a masterpiece of American history. By engaging with our state'southward painful past (and present) in an intellectually honest way, she has created a book that truly does encapsulate the American story in all its hurting and all its triumph."

–Michael Schaub,NPR

"A fantabulous rendering—filled with triumph, tragedy, and hope—that will please Lepore'due south readers immensely and win her many new ones."

—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"This thought-provoking and fascinating book stands to become the definitive one-book U.S. history for a new generation."

—Library Periodical, starred review

"An ambitious and provocative attempt to interpret American history every bit an effort to fulfill and maintain certain fundamental principles. . . . Lepore is a historian with broad popular appeal, and this comprehensive work will answer readers' questions nigh who we are as a nation."

—Booklist, starred review

"Phenomenal… [Lepore] has assembled show of an America that was amend than some idea, worse than nearly anyone imagined, and weirder than nigh serious history books ever convey. Armed with the facts of what happened earlier, we are ameliorate able to approach our collective task of figuring out what should happen now . . . Possibly instead of the next U2 anthology, Apple could make a copy ofThese Truths appear on every iPhone—not only considering information technology offers the basic civics pedagogy that every American needs, only because it is a welcome cosmetic to the corrosive histories peddled by partisans."

—Casey Due north. Cep,Harvard Mag

"In her ballsy new work, Jill Lepore helps united states acquire from whence we came."

—Oprah Mag

"Sweeping and propulsive."

—Vulture

" 'An old-fashioned civics book,' Harvard historian andNew Yorker contributor Jill Lepore calls information technology, a glint in her eye. This fat, ludicrously ambitious one-volume history is a lot more than than that. In its spirit of inquiry, in its eager iconoclasms,These Truths enacts the founding ideals of the country it describes.

―Huffington Post

"It's an audacious undertaking to write a readable history of America, and Jill Lepore is more than than up to the task. ButThese Truths is likewise an astute exploration of the ways in which the state is living upward to its potential, and where it is not."

—Business organisation Insider

"Gutsy, lyrical, and expressive… [These Truths] is a perceptive and necessary contribution to understanding the American condition of tardily.… It captures the fullness of the by, where hope rises out of despair, renewal out of destruction, and forward momentum out of setbacks."

—Jack E. Davis,Chicago Tribune

"Lepore's brilliant book,These Truths, rings as articulate as a church bong, the lucid, welcome yield of clear thinking and a capable, curious mind."

—Karen R. Long,Newsday

"A fantabulous rendering—filled with triumph, tragedy, and hope—that will delight Lepore'southward readers immensely and win her many new ones."

— Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"An ambitious and provocative effort to interpret American history equally an effort to fulfull and maintain certain cardinal principles . . . Lepore is a historian with wide popular appeal, and this comprehensive piece of work will answer readers' questions about who nosotros are equally a nation."

— Booklist, starred review

"In this time of disillusionment with American politics, Jill Lepore's beautifully written book should be essential reading for everyone who cares about the country's future. Her history of the United states reminds u.s.a. of the dilemmas that have plagued the land and the institutional strengths that take allowed us to survive as a democracy for over two centuries. At a minimum, her volume should exist required reading for every federal officeholder."

—Robert Dallek, author of Franklin D. Roosevelt

"No one has written with more passion and luminescence near how a flawed and combustible America kept itself tethered to the transcendent ideals on which it was founded. If the country is to recover from its current crisis, These Truths will illuminate the way."

—Gary Gerstle, author of Liberty and Coercion

"Who tin can write a comprehensive yet lucid history of the sprawling U.s. in a unmarried volume? Only Jill Lepore has the verve, wit, range, and insights to pull off this daring and provocative book. Interweaving many lively biographies, These Truths illuminates the origins of the passions and causes, which still inspire and divide Americans in an age that needs all the truth we can find."

—Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions

"Lepore brings a scholar's comprehensive rigor and a poet's lyrical precision to this singular single-volume history of the United States. Agreement America's by, as she demonstrates, has always been a central American project. She knows that the "story of America" is equally plural and mutable equally the nation itself, and the event is a piece of work of prismatic richness, ane that rewards not just reading simply rereading. This will be an instant classic."

—Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Lies that Bind

"Anyone interested in the future of the Republic must read this book. I of our greatest historians succeeds, where so many take failed, to make sense of the whole sail of our history. Without ignoring the horrors of conquest, slavery or recurring prejudices, she manages yet to capture the epic quality of the American by. With passion, pity, wit, and remarkable insight, Lepore brings it all to life, the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. This is a manifesto for our necessarily shared future."

—Lynn Hunt, author of History: Why it Matters

"In this inspiring and enlightening book, Jill Lepore accomplishes the grand chore of telling us what we need to know about our past in order to be good citizens today. Avoiding political and ideological agendas, she confronts the contradictions that come from being born a land of both liberty and slavery, just she uses such conflicts to find pregnant—and hope—in the tale of America's progress."

—Walter Isaacson, University Professor of History, Tulane, author of The Innovators

"Lepore is a truly gifted author with profound insight."

-Spectator

"This bright history brings alive the contradictions and hypocrisies of the land of the free"

- David Aaronovitch, The Times

"A history for the 21st century, far more than inclusive than the standard histories of the past"

- Guardian

"Awe-inspiring ... a crucial piece of work for presenting a fresh and clear-sighted narrative of the unabridged story ... exciting and page-turningly fascinating, in 1 of those rare history books that can be read with pleasure for its sheer narrative energy"

- Simon Winchester, New Statesman

"Jill Lepore is that rare combination in modern life of intellect, originality and style"

- Amanda Foreman, TLS
A brilliant, revelatory account of the Cold War origins of the data-mad, algorithmic twenty-starting time century, from the writer of the acclaimed international bestseller, These Truths.

The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and matted knowledge--decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine it has no past but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and straight man beliefs, deploying their "People Machine" from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients that included John Kennedy's presidential campaign, theNew York Times, Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam State of war, the Department of Defense. Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian andNew Yorkerstaff writer, unearthed from the archives the almost unbelievable story of this long-vanished corporation, and of the women subconscious behind it. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lepore argues, Simulmatics invented the future by building the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and tormented, algorithm past algorithm.

"A person tin can't assist but experience inspired by the riveting intelligence and joyful curiosity of Jill Lepore. Knowing that at that place is a mind like hers in the world is a hope-inducing thing."

            --George Saunders

"Everything Lepore writes is distinguished by intelligence, eloquence, and fresh insight.If Then is that, and even more: It's absolutely fascinating, excavating a piece of little-known American corporate history that reveals a huge amount about the way we live today and the companies that ascertain the modern era."

            --Susan Orlean

"Information scientific discipline, Jill Lepore reminds us in this brilliant book, has a by, and she tells it through the engrossing story of Simulmatics, the tiny, long-forgotten company that helped invent our data-obsessed globe, in which prediction is seemingly the only knowledge that matters. A captivating, deeply incisive work."

            —Frederik Logevall , Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Embers of State of war: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America'due south Vietnam

"Retrieve today's tech giants invented data mining and market manipulation? Think again. In this page-turning, heart-opening history, Jill Lepore reveals the Cold War roots of the tech-saturated nowadays, in a thrilling tale that moves from the campaigns of Eisenhower and Kennedy to ivied call up tanks, Madison Avenue ad firms, and the hamlets of Vietnam. Told with verve, grace, and humanity,If So is an essential, sobering story for understanding our times."

—Margaret O'Mara, author ofThe Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

"Information technology didn't all outset with Facebook. Nosotros accept long been fascinated with the potential of using computing technology to predict human behavior. In another fast-paced narrative, Jill Lepore brilliantly uncovers the history of the Simulmatics Corp, which launched the volatile mix of calculating, politics and personal beliefs that now divides our nation, feeds on private information, and weakens the forcefulness our democratic institutions. If you desire to know where this all started, you need non wait any further--read this book!"

— Julian Zelizer, author ofBurning Down the Firm: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker and the Rise of the New Republican Party

Jill Lepore is the David Wood Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and is also a staff author atThe New Yorker. A ii-fourth dimension Pulitzer Prize finalist, her many books include the international bestseller,These Truths.
A New York Times and National Bestseller and Winner of the 2015 American History Book Prize

"Ms. Lepore's lively, surprising and occasionally salacious history is far more than the story of a comic strip. The author, a professor of history at Harvard, places Wonder Woman squarely in the story of women's rights in America—a cycle of rights won, lost and endlessly fought for once more. Like many illuminating histories, this one shows how problems we debate today were nether contention but as vigorously decades agone, including nascence command, sex activity educational activity, the ways in which women can combine piece of work and family, and the effects of 'violent amusement' on children. 'The tragedy of feminism in the twentieth century is the manner its history seemed to be forever disappearing,' Ms. Lepore writes. Her superb narrative brings that history vividly into the present, weaving private lives into the sweeping changes of the century." —The Wall Street Journal

"Lepore'southward brilliance lies in knowing what to practice with the material she has. In her easily, the Wonder Woman story unpacks not just a new cultural history of feminism, just a theory of history besides." —New York Times Book Review

"Lepore specializes in excavating former flashpoints—forgotten or badly misremembered collisions between politics and cultural debates in America's past. She lays out for our mod sensibility how some upshot or social problem was fought over past interest groups, reformers, opportunists, and "thought leaders" of the day. The event can await both familiar and disturbing, like our era's arguments flipped in a funhouse mirror….Likewise archives and comics Lepore relies on journalism, notebooks, messages, and traces of memoir left past the principals, as well as interviews with surviving colleagues, children, and extended family. Her discipline is worthy of a first-class detective….Lepore convinces us that we should know more about early feminists whose piece of work Wonder Woman drew on and carried forward….A key spotter of connections, Lepore retrieves a remarkably recognizable feminist through-line, showing us 1920s debates about work-life residual, for example, that sound like something from The Atlantic in the by decade." —New York Review of Books"Even non-comix nerds (or those too young to call up Lynda Carter) volition marvel at Jill Lepore's deep swoop into the existent-world origins of the Amazonian superhero with the golden lasso. The fact that a polyamory enthusiast created her partly as a tribute to the reproductive-rights pioneer Margaret Sanger is, somehow, but the 4th or 5th nearly interesting affair in Ms. Woman's bizarre background." —New York Magazine"With a defiantly unhurried ease, Lepore reconstructs the prevailing cultural mood that birthed the thought of Wonder Adult female, carefully delineating the conceptual debt the grapheme owes to early-20th-century feminism in full general and the birth control movement in particular….Again and once again, she distills the figures she writes about into clean, unproblematic, muscular prose, making unequivocal assertions that carry a faint electric accuse…[and] reach a transgressive, downright badass swagger." —Slate"Deftly combines biography and cultural history to trace the entwined stories of Marston, Wonder Woman, and 20th-century feminism….Lepore – a professor of American history at Harvard, a New Yorker writer, and the author of "Book of Ages" – is an endlessly energetic and knowledgeable guide to the fascinating backstory of Wonder Adult female. She'southward particularly skillful at showing the subtle process by which personal details migrate from life into art." —Christian Science Monitor"Wonder Woman, everyone'southward favorite female person superhero (impenetrable bracelets, hello!), gets the Lasso of Truth handling in this illuminating biography. Lepore, a Harvard prof and New Yorker author, delves into the complicated family life of Wonder Woman's creator (who invented the lie detector, BTW), examines the use of bondage in his comics, and highlights the many ways in which the honey Amazonian princess has come to embody feminism."—Cosmopolitan
"The Cloak-and-dagger History of Wonder Adult female
relates a tale so improbable, so juicy, information technology'll accept y'all maxim, "Merciful Minerva!"… an astonishingly thorough investigation of the human being behind the world's most popular female superhero…. Lepore has assembled a vast trove of images and deploys them cunningly. Besides a hefty full-color section of Wonder Woman art in the middle, there are dozens of black-and-white pictures scattered throughout the text. Many of these are panels from Marston's comics that mirror events in his own life. Combined with Lepore's zippy prose, information technology all makes for a supremely engaging reading experience." —Etelka Lehoczky, NPR"If it makes your caput spin to imagine a skimpily clad pop civilization icon as (spoiler alert!) a close relation of feminist nativity control abet Margaret Sanger, then prepare to be dazzled past the truths revealed in historian Jill Lepore's "The Clandestine History of Wonder Woman." The story backside Wonder Adult female is sensational, spellbinding and utterly improbable. Her origins lie in the feminism of the early 1900s, and the intertwined dramas that surrounded her creation are the stuff of pulp fiction and tabloid scandal….Information technology took a super-sleuth to uncover the mysteries of this intricate history, hidden from view for more half a century. With acrobatic inquiry prowess, muscular narrative chops and disarming flashes of sense of humour, Lepore rises to the challenge, bringing to light previously unknown details and deliberately obfuscated connections." —San Francisco Chronicle"This captivating, sometimes racy, charming illustrated history is one function biography of the character and one part biography of her fascinating creator, psychologist and inventor William Moulton Marston—an early feminist who believed, manner before his time, that the world would exist a better place if only women were running it….In the process of bringing her 'superhero' to life in this very advisedly researched, witty secret 'herstory,' Lepore herself emerges equally a kind of superheroine: a woman on a mission—as energetic, powerful, brilliant and provocative as her field of study." —Skilful Housekeeping"This book is of import, readable scholarship, making the connection between popular civilisation and the deeper history of the American adult female's fight for equality….Lepore restores Wonder Woman to her rightful and righteous place." —The Kansas City Star

"Fascinating…often brilliant….Through assiduous research (the endnotes incorporate almost a tertiary of the volume and are frequently very interesting reading), Lepore unravels a subconscious history, and in and so doing links her subjects' lives to some of the most important social movements of the era. It's a remarkable, thought-provoking accomplishment." —Bookpage"The Marston family unit's story is ripe for psychoanalysis. And and so is The Secret History, since it raises interesting questions about what motivates writers to cull the subjects of their books. Having devoted her last work to Jane Franklin Mecom, Benjamin Franklin's sis, Lepore clearly has a passion for intelligent, opinionated women whose legacies have been overshadowed by the men they dear. In her ain modest way, she's helping women get the justice they deserve, not unlike her tiara'd counterpart….It has virtually everything you might want in a page-turner: tales of S&Thou, skeletons in the closet, a believe-information technology-or-not weirdness in its biographical details, and something else that secretly powers even the most "serious" feminist history—fun." —Amusement Weekly"An origin story far deeper, weirder, and kinkier than anything a cartoonist e'er invented." —Vulture"Lepore restores Wonder Woman to her rightful place as an essential women's rights icon in this dynamically researched and interpreted, spectacularly illustrated, downright phenomenal work of discovery that injects new zest into the history of feminism." —Booklist (*starred review*)

"The fullest and nearly fascinating portrait ever created about the complicated, anarchistic family that inspired i of the well-nigh enduring feminist icons in pop culture…. The Hugger-mugger History of Wonder Woman is its own magic lasso, ane that compels history to finally tell the truth almost Wonder Woman—and compels the rest of u.s. to behold information technology." —Los Angeles Times

"The Secret History of Wonder Woman is as racy, equally improbable, as awesomely righteous, and as filled with curious devices as an episode of the comic book itself. In the nexus of feminism and popular civilisation, Jill Lepore has constitute a revelatory chapter of American history. I will never await at Wonder Woman's bracelets the aforementioned way again." —Alison Bechdel, writer of Fun Home

"Hugely entertaining." --The Atlantic

"Lepore has an astonishing story and tells it extremely well. She acts every bit a sort of lie detector, but gain through elegant narrative rather than binary exam. Sentences are poised, adverbs rare. Each affiliate is carefully shaped. At a time when few are disposed to see history as a branch of literature, Lepore occupies a prominent place in American letters. Her microhistories weave compelling lives into larger stories." —The Daily Beast

"In the spirited, thoroughly reported "The Secret History of Wonder Adult female," Jill Lepore recounts the fascinating details behind the Amazonian princess' origin story….[Lepore]seamlessly shifts from the micro to the macro….A console depicting this labor unrest is simply i of scores that announced throughout Lepore'due south volume, further amplifying the author's bright prose."—Newsday"A Harvard professor with impeccable scholarly credentials, Lepore treats her subject area seriously, as if she is writing the biography of a feminist pioneer like Margaret Sanger, the founder of the birth control movement — which this book is, to an extent….Through extensive research and a careful reading of the Wonder Woman comic books, she argues convincingly that the story of this character is an enduring chapter in the history of women'southward rights." —Miami Herald
A Finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction

From ane of our well-nigh achieved and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin'south youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted author, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a female parent of twelve. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sis than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made homo; his sister spent her life caring for her children. They left very different traces behind. Making employ of an astonishing cache of little- studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one adult female but an entire world—a globe usually lost to history. Lepore'southward life of Jane Franklin, with its strikingly original vantage on her remarkable blood brother, is at once a wholly different business relationship of the founding of the United States and ane of the great untold stories of American history and letters: a life unknown.