The Origins of America’s Enduring Divisions

For Jill Lepore, the United States has always been a nation caught between its sunny ideals and its darker realities.

• Michael Kazin
• The New Republic

“To write history is to make an argument by telling a story,” Jill Lepore once explained.

And the argument a historian makes about America’s long, turbulent, and demographically complex past—from the arrival of the first European settlers in the sixteenth century to the triumph of Donald Trump—depends…

It’s the story of a white man’s empire, many scholars on the left contend, against which dissenters of all races and genders have struggled to create a truly democratic society.

No, insist most…

• The Origins of…