Every so often a one-volume U.S. history book comes along that's important. "In 1834, when the nation was barely more than a half-century old" George Bancroft wrote History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present. It begins a continual process of seriously telling, and retelling, America's history. Bancroft's pioneering work has such important stories in it as that of John Stark, trapper:
"danger lowered from the forest on the whole American frontier. In the early summer of 1752, John Stark, of New Hampshire, as fearless a young forester as ever bivouacked in the wilderness, was trapping beaver along the clear brooks of his native highlands, when a party of St. Francis Indians stole upon his steps, and scalped one of his companions. He himself, by courage and good humor, won the love of his captors; their tribe saluted him as a young chief, and cherished him with hearty kindness; his Indian master, accepting a ransom, restored him to his country."
The "St. Francis Indians", by the way, were the Abenaki.
Stark, later a British officer in the Seven Years War, is not a particularly important American hero, his story not actually all that memorable. As the country grew in size and age, such anecdotes had to be left out - there simply was not room enough for them. But this is what historians do - they select what is worthy of inclusion, and what is not.
Jill Lepore, professor of History at Harvard, has created an ambitious one volume history, which, I think, is important. It is an account for our times, post-2016, and tries to learn from the mistakes of so many one-volume accounts that came before. Early US histories have the same three basic problems:
1) Under-representing women
2) Under-representing African Americans
3) Under-representing indigenous peoples
Racism often mired accounts of the latter two, and patriarchal blindness the former. So in 1980, when Howard Zinn published his watershed A People's History of the United States, and James Loewen followed in 1995 with the now-classic Lies My Teacher Told Me, academia corrected a 150 year-old problem, passed down from Bancroft.
America's history is not just the history of white males in power, winning wars, and making laws. And, as marvelous as Frederick Douglass was, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Geronimo, tokenism was not the way to present the true history of the United States. By the mid-1990s textbooks across the country reflected the actual diversity of the nation, and did not whitewash or gloss over slavery, genocide, internment, and our fuller, more complex, legacy. Compare that choice to a section from an old US History textbook I own, Scudder's History of the United States, published in 1884 (just after Garfield's assassination):
"For the most part the slaves were an idle, easy-going people. They were affectionate and warmly attached to their masters and mistresses if these were kind to them. They had little thoughts of anything beyond eating and sleeping and playing. They had their holidays, and when Christmas came they flocked to the great house to receive their presents."
Remember, this was written after Reconstruction. John Brown, in Scudder's work - by no means a minor text in the annals of American textbooks - is dealt with as a curiosity, an odd man given his two paragraphs. Zinn and Loewen clearly had a lot to fix - and did so admirably. But history is not static, and as soon as it goes to press, an historical account is out of date. The recent times have been wanting for a new historical reckoning, one to match our moment.
Lepore's work does this. It expertly traces the threads most pertinent to explaining how we got to where we are today. Its scope is political - do not expect to find Louis Armstrong, Samuel Colt, or John Stark in this book. Her narrative tackles the main questions which have bedeviled the nation since before it was one: How can democracy work most effectively? Who gets to be a citizen - or even a person?, and What role does information, and technology, play in all this?
That said, she has two particularly odd omissions. Lepore works through definitions of citizenship which include Asian immigration, for example, from the Gold Rush to Korematsu. She plots the parallel course of one of George Washington's runaway slaves, Harry Washington, on his escape to Canada, and eventual course to Africa. The women's rights movement, with all of its pre-Progressive false starts and failures, is carefully traced, including, again in parallel, Benjamin Franklin's sister, Jane.
But indigenous peoples, who have an obvious connection to questions of identity and citizenship, are left out. Slaves, women, and other typically forgotten groups (pre-Zinn) get plenty of pages. John Brown's place has moved, in These Truths, from Scudder's curiosity, to multiple pages of in-depth analysis. And judiciously placed minor characters are given a chance to speak, as well, from 18th century free-speech advocate John Peter Zenger, to Hawaiian Representative Patsy Mink.
But nowhere does Tecumseh get a mention. Nor Sitting Bull. Geronimo is referenced in a passing sentence regarding the Dawes Act - which set up the assimilation and reservation system. Indeed, even the Trail of Tears, which Lepore spends one page on, quotes instead General Winifield Scott, but gives no voice to the leaders of the Cherokee, beyond an anonymous printed statement of their case. John Ross and John Ridge, major players in that tragic event, don't get to speak for themselves, or debate their role in America, as Lepore allows women, slaves, and others to do. The most important act after creating reservations was Coolidge's Indian Citizenship Act, in 1924, which made Native Americans citizens, instead of the old Constitutional distinction of "Indians, not taxed". It is nowhere mentioned.
This is the first odd omission, then, and the most egregious, in light of her stated aims. To write a work about citizenship and jump from Powhatan and Metacom, across centuries to the Trail of Tears, and then to Dawes, and finally one sentence on the American Indian Movement, jumping in a bound from Geronimo to the 1970s, is, at best, an inexcusable oversight, and at worst a conscious decision to exclude native peoples in the reckoning of America.
Second, the word "gerrymander" makes no appearance in her work. The choice, in 1911, called the Apportionment Act, which set the number of Congressmen at 435, when the country was 1/3 the size it is today, is also never mentioned - despite leading to an increasingly disproportionate House of Representatives. The direct election of Senators is mentioned in passing in one sentence: along with the presidential primary, the Federal Reserve, and Prohibition. This is peculiar, since, as the work goes on, the focus of the third and fourth sections, covering Reconstruction until present, serve as a long crescendo of increased polarization.
George Gallup and Campaigns Inc., Phyllis Schlafly and Thurgood Marshall, Joseph Pulitzer and Roger Ailes: they all get their time in the sun exposing how we became so polarized, and dysfunctional. How "the people" turned into manipulable "masses". But there are other, very significant issues beyond Lepore's main concerns of polling, political campaign machinery, social media, and the trend of aligning parties to ideologies (guns and abortion in particular). Voter repression, in Lepore's world, has no place or role after the Voting Rights Act. Trayvon Martin gets the ink he deserves - but I question if he deserves more page space than the Citizens United decision, which is allowed just half of a half-page paragraph.
These are two significant omissions: first, the rights, citizenship, and personhood of indigenous peoples, and second, the more systemic attempts by conservatives in the Republican Party to suppress voters through gerrymandering, voter ID laws, Super PACs, and the like. (Lepore addresses court-packing, but that is only one part of the story.) The omissions come together in a particularly timely, and poignant way:
On October 9th, the Supreme Court declined intervening (ruling 6-2, with Kagan and Ginsburg dissenting) in a case called Brakebill v. Jaeger, thereby stating that many, if not most, Native Americans can't vote in North Dakota. The reason is a voter ID law, which requires a street address. Unfortunately, for the tens of thousands of indigenous people who live on reservations, they have PO boxes - not street addresses.
This is not an academic concern, since the Senator of the state up for reelection, Heidi Heitkamp, is a Democrat in a state where her only hope for keeping her seat is with Native American turnout. And the Senate currently is 49 Democrats to 51 Republicans. Yes - a conservative court is a part of this, but this is a perfect example of why the threads of the story Lepore left out were actually quite important.
Beyond these omissions, though, the work is fascinating, and worth a read. At just about 800 pages, the last section, from 1945 to present, covers 270 of those pages. The first section, from the three centuries of 1492 to 1799, covers a mere 150. Acceleration is in the background and foreground of the work, as technology and population become more relentless drivers of both change in the electorate, and change in our politics. These Truths feels like a real sprint at the end, but the dizzying pace can be said to honestly reflect a dizzying time.
Finally, from the New York Times book review, I quote Andrew Sullivan at length, lamenting Lepore's New Yorker magazine style, and sometimes painful writing:
"There are moments, however, when you wince at the purple prose. “The Republic was spreading like ferns on the floor of a forest.” Dred Scott was “suffering from tuberculosis, a slow sickness, a constitutional weakening, as relentless as the disease that wracked the nation itself. Frederick Douglass watched, and looked for a cure, an end to suffering. … But it was as if the nation, like Oedipus of Thebes, had seen that in its origins lay a curse, and had gouged out its own eyes.” Oof. The last two paragraphs of the book amount to one of the most excruciating extended metaphors — yes, the ship of state! — I have ever had the misfortune to struggle through."
"But these are quibbles. We need this book. Its reach is long, its narrative fresh and the arc of its account sobering to say the least. This is not Whig history. It is a classic tale of a unique country’s astonishing rise and just-as-inevitable fall."
"danger lowered from the forest on the whole American frontier. In the early summer of 1752, John Stark, of New Hampshire, as fearless a young forester as ever bivouacked in the wilderness, was trapping beaver along the clear brooks of his native highlands, when a party of St. Francis Indians stole upon his steps, and scalped one of his companions. He himself, by courage and good humor, won the love of his captors; their tribe saluted him as a young chief, and cherished him with hearty kindness; his Indian master, accepting a ransom, restored him to his country."
The "St. Francis Indians", by the way, were the Abenaki.
Stark, later a British officer in the Seven Years War, is not a particularly important American hero, his story not actually all that memorable. As the country grew in size and age, such anecdotes had to be left out - there simply was not room enough for them. But this is what historians do - they select what is worthy of inclusion, and what is not.
Jill Lepore, professor of History at Harvard, has created an ambitious one volume history, which, I think, is important. It is an account for our times, post-2016, and tries to learn from the mistakes of so many one-volume accounts that came before. Early US histories have the same three basic problems:
1) Under-representing women
2) Under-representing African Americans
3) Under-representing indigenous peoples
Racism often mired accounts of the latter two, and patriarchal blindness the former. So in 1980, when Howard Zinn published his watershed A People's History of the United States, and James Loewen followed in 1995 with the now-classic Lies My Teacher Told Me, academia corrected a 150 year-old problem, passed down from Bancroft.
America's history is not just the history of white males in power, winning wars, and making laws. And, as marvelous as Frederick Douglass was, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Geronimo, tokenism was not the way to present the true history of the United States. By the mid-1990s textbooks across the country reflected the actual diversity of the nation, and did not whitewash or gloss over slavery, genocide, internment, and our fuller, more complex, legacy. Compare that choice to a section from an old US History textbook I own, Scudder's History of the United States, published in 1884 (just after Garfield's assassination):
"For the most part the slaves were an idle, easy-going people. They were affectionate and warmly attached to their masters and mistresses if these were kind to them. They had little thoughts of anything beyond eating and sleeping and playing. They had their holidays, and when Christmas came they flocked to the great house to receive their presents."
Remember, this was written after Reconstruction. John Brown, in Scudder's work - by no means a minor text in the annals of American textbooks - is dealt with as a curiosity, an odd man given his two paragraphs. Zinn and Loewen clearly had a lot to fix - and did so admirably. But history is not static, and as soon as it goes to press, an historical account is out of date. The recent times have been wanting for a new historical reckoning, one to match our moment.
Lepore's work does this. It expertly traces the threads most pertinent to explaining how we got to where we are today. Its scope is political - do not expect to find Louis Armstrong, Samuel Colt, or John Stark in this book. Her narrative tackles the main questions which have bedeviled the nation since before it was one: How can democracy work most effectively? Who gets to be a citizen - or even a person?, and What role does information, and technology, play in all this?
That said, she has two particularly odd omissions. Lepore works through definitions of citizenship which include Asian immigration, for example, from the Gold Rush to Korematsu. She plots the parallel course of one of George Washington's runaway slaves, Harry Washington, on his escape to Canada, and eventual course to Africa. The women's rights movement, with all of its pre-Progressive false starts and failures, is carefully traced, including, again in parallel, Benjamin Franklin's sister, Jane.
But indigenous peoples, who have an obvious connection to questions of identity and citizenship, are left out. Slaves, women, and other typically forgotten groups (pre-Zinn) get plenty of pages. John Brown's place has moved, in These Truths, from Scudder's curiosity, to multiple pages of in-depth analysis. And judiciously placed minor characters are given a chance to speak, as well, from 18th century free-speech advocate John Peter Zenger, to Hawaiian Representative Patsy Mink.
But nowhere does Tecumseh get a mention. Nor Sitting Bull. Geronimo is referenced in a passing sentence regarding the Dawes Act - which set up the assimilation and reservation system. Indeed, even the Trail of Tears, which Lepore spends one page on, quotes instead General Winifield Scott, but gives no voice to the leaders of the Cherokee, beyond an anonymous printed statement of their case. John Ross and John Ridge, major players in that tragic event, don't get to speak for themselves, or debate their role in America, as Lepore allows women, slaves, and others to do. The most important act after creating reservations was Coolidge's Indian Citizenship Act, in 1924, which made Native Americans citizens, instead of the old Constitutional distinction of "Indians, not taxed". It is nowhere mentioned.
This is the first odd omission, then, and the most egregious, in light of her stated aims. To write a work about citizenship and jump from Powhatan and Metacom, across centuries to the Trail of Tears, and then to Dawes, and finally one sentence on the American Indian Movement, jumping in a bound from Geronimo to the 1970s, is, at best, an inexcusable oversight, and at worst a conscious decision to exclude native peoples in the reckoning of America.
Second, the word "gerrymander" makes no appearance in her work. The choice, in 1911, called the Apportionment Act, which set the number of Congressmen at 435, when the country was 1/3 the size it is today, is also never mentioned - despite leading to an increasingly disproportionate House of Representatives. The direct election of Senators is mentioned in passing in one sentence: along with the presidential primary, the Federal Reserve, and Prohibition. This is peculiar, since, as the work goes on, the focus of the third and fourth sections, covering Reconstruction until present, serve as a long crescendo of increased polarization.
George Gallup and Campaigns Inc., Phyllis Schlafly and Thurgood Marshall, Joseph Pulitzer and Roger Ailes: they all get their time in the sun exposing how we became so polarized, and dysfunctional. How "the people" turned into manipulable "masses". But there are other, very significant issues beyond Lepore's main concerns of polling, political campaign machinery, social media, and the trend of aligning parties to ideologies (guns and abortion in particular). Voter repression, in Lepore's world, has no place or role after the Voting Rights Act. Trayvon Martin gets the ink he deserves - but I question if he deserves more page space than the Citizens United decision, which is allowed just half of a half-page paragraph.
These are two significant omissions: first, the rights, citizenship, and personhood of indigenous peoples, and second, the more systemic attempts by conservatives in the Republican Party to suppress voters through gerrymandering, voter ID laws, Super PACs, and the like. (Lepore addresses court-packing, but that is only one part of the story.) The omissions come together in a particularly timely, and poignant way:
On October 9th, the Supreme Court declined intervening (ruling 6-2, with Kagan and Ginsburg dissenting) in a case called Brakebill v. Jaeger, thereby stating that many, if not most, Native Americans can't vote in North Dakota. The reason is a voter ID law, which requires a street address. Unfortunately, for the tens of thousands of indigenous people who live on reservations, they have PO boxes - not street addresses.
This is not an academic concern, since the Senator of the state up for reelection, Heidi Heitkamp, is a Democrat in a state where her only hope for keeping her seat is with Native American turnout. And the Senate currently is 49 Democrats to 51 Republicans. Yes - a conservative court is a part of this, but this is a perfect example of why the threads of the story Lepore left out were actually quite important.
Beyond these omissions, though, the work is fascinating, and worth a read. At just about 800 pages, the last section, from 1945 to present, covers 270 of those pages. The first section, from the three centuries of 1492 to 1799, covers a mere 150. Acceleration is in the background and foreground of the work, as technology and population become more relentless drivers of both change in the electorate, and change in our politics. These Truths feels like a real sprint at the end, but the dizzying pace can be said to honestly reflect a dizzying time.
Finally, from the New York Times book review, I quote Andrew Sullivan at length, lamenting Lepore's New Yorker magazine style, and sometimes painful writing:
"There are moments, however, when you wince at the purple prose. “The Republic was spreading like ferns on the floor of a forest.” Dred Scott was “suffering from tuberculosis, a slow sickness, a constitutional weakening, as relentless as the disease that wracked the nation itself. Frederick Douglass watched, and looked for a cure, an end to suffering. … But it was as if the nation, like Oedipus of Thebes, had seen that in its origins lay a curse, and had gouged out its own eyes.” Oof. The last two paragraphs of the book amount to one of the most excruciating extended metaphors — yes, the ship of state! — I have ever had the misfortune to struggle through."
I also winced at the Epilogue's 'ship of state' because it's so godawful, however, like Sullivan, I concur that overall the pros outweigh the cons:
Indeed, the ending is very dark. Referring to 2016, the book closes with these lines (spoliers!):
"The election had nearly rent the nation in two. It had stoked fears, incited hatreds, and sown doubts about American leadership in the world, and the future of democracy itself. But remorse would wait for another day. And so would a remedy."
Recommendation: Go read this book.
