Jill Lepore

The challenge of retelling five hundred years of American history in a single volume has been so daunting that hardly any historian has attempted it in decades. When Jill Lepore's New York Times best-selling These Truths appeared in 2018, critics quickly hailed it as a classic--appealing not only to academics, but to thousands of astonished general readers. Picking up the book out of a feeling of civic duty, they opened its pages to discover a different kind of writing, and what the Washington Post called "an honest reckoning with America's past"--a story filled with women and men and people of every color and religion, one that wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. With These Truths, Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.

A History of the United States

These Truths

The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge--decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine that 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 direct human behavior, deploying their "People Machine" from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients that included John Kennedy's presidential campaign, the New York Times, Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam War, the Department of Defense. Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, unearthed from archives the almost unbelievable story of this long-vanished corporation, and of the women hidden 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 by algorithm.

How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

If Then

A cultural history of Wonder Woman traces the character's creation and enduring popularity, drawing on interviews and archival research to reveal the pivotal role of feminism in shaping her seven-decade story. By the Pulitzer Prize-finalist author of New York Burning. 75,000 first printing.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman

"[A] work that examines the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century. At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Harvard historian Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in [this] work of political philosophy as well as a reclamation of America's national history"--

The Case for the Nation

This America

"A "New Yorker" staff writer and Harvard historian chronicles the discovery of Joe Gould's long-lost manuscript, "The Oral History of Our Time," and of the violence, betrayals, and madness that led to its concealment, "--NoveList.

Joe Gould's Teeth

Examines how the American colonists interpreted the brutal war that erupted between them and Native Americans in New England in 1675, showing how they looked to it during the Revolution and used it to justify nineteenth-century Indian removals. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity

The Name of War

Associate Professor of History and American Studies Jill Lepore

A portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister, Jane, reveals how she was, like her brother, a passionate reader, gifted writer, and shrewd political commentator who made insightful observations about early America.

The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

Book of Ages

A book to be read and kept for posterity, The Deadline is the art of the essay at its best.

Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented—but armed—aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore’s life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead.” Echoing Gore Vidal’s United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay—and of history—itself.

The Deadline: Essays

How One Data Company Invented the Future

Examines the origins of dozens of writings, speeches, and other printed pieces from American history--from paper ballots and the Constitution to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" and Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address.

Essays on Origins

The Story of America

"A history of American ideas about life and death includes coverage of topics ranging from the 17th-century Englishman who investigated a belief about life starting with eggs and the heated debates over Darwin's evolutionary findings to the role of the Space Age in changing views on planetary life to the 1970s trends in cryogenics." --Publishers description

A History of Life and Death

The Mansion of Happiness

Americans have always put the past to political ends. The Union laid claim to the Revolution--so did the Confederacy. Civil rights leaders said they were the true sons of liberty--so did Southern segregationists. This book tells the story of the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of the nation's founding, including the battle waged by the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to "take back America." Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, offers a wry and bemused look at American history according to the far right, from the "rant heard round the world," which launched the Tea Party, to the Texas School Board's adoption of a social-studies curriculum that teaches that the United States was established as a Christian nation. Along the way, she provides rare insight into the eighteenth-century struggle for independence--the real one, that is. Lepore traces the roots of the far right's reactionary history to the bicentennial in the 1970s, when no one could agree on what story a divided nation should tell about its unruly beginnings. Behind the Tea Party's Revolution, she argues, lies a nostalgic and even heartbreaking yearning for an imagined past--a time less troubled by ambiguity, strife, and uncertainty--a yearning for an America that never was. The Whites of Their Eyes reveals that the far right has embraced a narrative about America's founding that is not only a fable but is also, finally, a variety of fundamentalism--anti-intellectual, antihistorical, and dangerously antipluralist.

The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History

The Whites of Their Eyes

Eine Geschichte der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika

Diese Wahrheiten

Queste verità. Una storia degli Stati Uniti d'America

A chronicle of an alleged eighteenth-century slave conspiracy to destroy New York City explores the social and political climate of the 1730s and 1740s and the implications of the conspiracy in terms of American politics and history.

Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-century Manhattan

New York Burning

Jane Kamensky

In Boston in 1764, the sudden death of revolutionary leader Samuel Bradstreet causes Scottish portrait painter Stewart Jameson and his apprentice Francis Weston--who is really a fallen woman from an elite family disguised as a boy--to search for the truth

By a Gentleman in Exile and a Lady in Disguise

Blindspot

Paul McCartney

Eyes of the Storm

1964

JILL LEPORE ÜBER DIE ERSTE SUPERHELDIN DER POPKULTUR Jill Lepores berühmtes, nun endlich auch auf Deutsch vorliegendes Buch ist ein Kabinettstück. Es erzählt die Geschichte von Wonder Woman und dechiffriert zugleich in einer brillanten Spurensuche die darin versteckte Geschichte des Feminismus. So witzig und geistreich hat noch selten jemand Popkultur und Frauenbewegung miteinander verknüpft. Für «Die geheime Geschichte von Wonder Woman» hat Jill Lepore Archive durchforstet, Interviews geführt, Tagebücher gelesen und sich durch Gerichtsprotokolle gearbeitet. Das Ergebnis ist eine rasante Kulturgeschichte, in der ein exzentrischer Psychologe, Erfinder (dem wir auch den Lügendetektor verdanken) und Bigamist, eine aufregende Amazone und die Vorkämpferinnen des amerikanischen Feminismus die Bühne bevölkern. Ebenso unterhaltsam wie scharfsinnig zeigt die renommierte Historikerin, wie die Kämpfe, Hoffnungen und Rückschläge der Frauenrechtsbewegung hineingewoben sind in die Abenteuer einer Superheldin, die nicht nur bösen Fieslingen, sondern auch dem Patriarchat tapfer die Stirn bietet. Jill Lepore über die Geschichte des Feminismus in Amerika im Spiegel der Wonder Woman Comics Wie jeder Superheld hat Wonder Woman eine geheime Identität. Aber anders als alle anderen Superhelden hat sie auch eine geheime Geschichte Von der Autorin des SPIEGEL-Bestsellers "Diese Wahrheiten"

Die geheime Geschichte von Wonder Woman

A study of the ways in which language was used in the early American republic to define national character and shape national boundaries focuses on the contributions of seven men who worked with alphabets, codes, and signs--including Noah Webster, William Thornton, Sequoyah, Thomas Gallaudet, Abdul Rahaman, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Alexander Graham Bell. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Jill Lepore

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