Jill Lepore is the author of “The Secret History of Wonder Woman.” Photo courtesy of Dakota Corbin/Unsplash.
On Thursday April 25, the award winning historian, author, and David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, Jill Lepore, spoke to a nearly full Palmer Auditorium at the fourth annual installation of the President’s Distinguished Lecture Series.
Despite the dry and somewhat tired feeling of the welcome address given by Dean of the College Jefferson Singer, hopes were high and audience members remained optimistic to hear Lepore, a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and veteran staff writer for The New Yorker, give her lecture “American History From Beginning to End,” about her most recent scholarly publication, “These Truths: A History of the United States.”
“These Truths” is a mammoth study of American history and the American experiment, tracing the uneven and often violent course of development our democracy has taken from its inception up to today. With a topic this broad and a timeframe beginning around 1492 and ending in 2016, it’s a wonder that Lepore was able to create such a compelling narrative that keeps readers hooked and eager to continue the nearly 1,000 page volume. As President Bergeron remarked in her introduction of Lepore, “These Truths” tells the whole story of America, painful details and all.
Lepore is a scholar of a rare breed – she actually makes sure her work is legible and comprehensible to those outside of the Academy. Joking about how academics write in an aggressively competitive and overly complicated manner, Lepore made it clear to the audience of Conn students and New London locals that her intention was to do the opposite; this was received with raucous cheers from the crowd, an audible rebuking of the elitist form academic writing often takes.
Professor Lepore’s lecture style was far from the typical historian’s approach. While many visiting historians give drab talks, steeped in theory about hyper-niche topics, Lepore’s lecture felt more like an interactive TED talk packed full of images, graphs, and “conceptual maps” to help give the audience a better understanding of the tumultuous history of the United States and the ways in which narratives or iconography about national identity have been produced, reproduced, and altered over time. When asked why she chose this method she said, with the timing of a great comedian, “I tend to teach with images because images teach well… and I don’t like people looking at me.”
After working through approximately 500 years of history in a cool forty-five minutes, Lepore began to talk about the United States today. She remarked that political polarization, income inequality, and arguments about what it means to be an “American” are on the rise, and there seems to be no end in sight to these conversations. But while it may feel as though things right now are worse than ever before, Lepore’s deft historical analysis left the audience with an appreciation of those that have come before us and fought to make this country a more equitable place– a place that lives up to the founding ideals or “these truths” that the country’s founding fathers set in stone. •
