These Truths: A History of the United States

“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR BooksA New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the YearIn the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation.Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’ s one-volume history of America places truth itself— a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence —at the center of the nation’s history.

The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them— political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people.

But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise?These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them.