Jill Lepore – författare

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY 2026ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2025LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION 2025THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA THE ECONOMIST, HISTORY TODAY, NEW YORK TIMES, NEW YORKER AND WASHINGTON POST BOOK OF THE YEAROn the 250th anniversary of America's founding - a landmark history of the US Constitution for a troubling new era.The US Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world - and one of the most difficult to amend. Although nearly twelve thousand amendments have been proposed since 1789, only twenty-seven have ever been ratified. Tellingly, the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Without amendment, the risk of political violence rises. So does the risk of constitutional change by presidential power.Leading Harvard historian Jill Lepore captures the stories of generations of ordinary people who have attempted everything from abolishing the Electoral College to guaranteeing environmental rights, hoping to mend their nation. Recounting the history of America through centuries of efforts to realize the promise of the Constitution, we witness how nearly all those bids have failed.We the People is the sweeping account of a struggle, arguing that the Constitution was never intended to be preserved, but was expected to be gradually altered. At a time when the risk of political violence is all too real, it hints at the prospects for a better, amended America.

Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. "A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history," Lepore writes. “Clear in purpose and elegant in design" (TLS), These Truths observes, "The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden.” "It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.

From Columbus's voyage in 1492 to the publication of the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, in 1789, Jill Lepore, winner of the distinguished Bancroft Prize for history, brings to life in exciting, first-person detail some of the earliest events in American history in Encounters in the New World. Providing fascinating commentary along the way, Lepore seamlessly links together primary sources that illustrate the powerful clash of cultures in the Americas. Through emotional eyewitness accounts -- memoirs, petitions, diaries, captivity narratives, private correspondence -- formal documents, official reports, and journalistic reportage, dramatic stories of the New World are revealed, including:* A Jesuit priest's chronicle of life among his Iroquois captors* Aztec records of forbidding omens* John Smith's account of cannibalism among the British residents of Jamestown* Memoirs by members of Cortes's expedition* Reminiscences of an escaped slave A special 16-page color cartographic section, including maps from both Europe and North America, provides a fascinating look at how the maps' creators saw themselves and the world around them.

It presented itself as a form of futurism. But the future envisioned by the architects of the Artificial State looked, chillingly, like the very worst of the past…We live in the age of data. Over the past century, rapidly evolving technologies have transformed every aspect of our society, in troubling and seemingly unstoppable ways. Political campaigns have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, multinational corporations control public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to an end, replaced by the rule of artificial intelligence. Today, power is maintained through mystification: machines, we are told, know what humans cannot. Yet nothing about any of this was, or is, inevitable.In this astounding account of how technology has corroded democracy around the world, prizewinning historian Jill Lepore traces the rise and fall of what she calls the ‘Artificial State’. Examining everything from robot rights and Elon Musk’s origins to what data centres cost wildlife, Lepore offers a history – and a perspective – wholly missing from the debate.History, Lepore demonstrates, is driven not by machines but by individuals, societies, cultures and ideas. The architects of the Artificial State had no theory of governance, nor did they have any interest in the rule of law, or any capacity for restraint. They drew their ideas not from science, but from science fiction. Yet everything destructive that they have done can be undone. By illuminating the origins of the Artificial State, Lepore reveals how we can escape it – helping us to imagine, and fight for, a different future.

The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths”, Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, “on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching”, writes Jill Lepore in a ground-breaking investigation into the American past that places truth at the centre of the nation’s history.Telling the story of America, beginning in 1492, These Truths asks whether the course of events has proven the nation’s founding truths or belied them. Finding meaning in contradiction, Lepore weaves American history into a tapestry of faith and hope, of peril and prosperity, of technological progress and moral anguish. This spellbinding chronicle offers an authoritative new history of a great, and greatly troubled, nation.

The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths”, Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, “on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching”, writes Jill Lepore in a ground-breaking investigation into the American past that places truth at the centre of the nation’s history.Telling the story of America, beginning in 1492, These Truths asks whether the course of events has proven the nation’s founding truths or belied them. Finding meaning in contradiction, Lepore weaves American history into a tapestry of faith and hope, of peril and prosperity, of technological progress and moral anguish. This spellbinding chronicle offers an authoritative new history of a great, and greatly troubled, nation.

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 careful and concerned 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--a history of the Revolution, from the archives. 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. In a new afterword, Lepore addresses both the recent shift in Tea Party rhetoric from the Revolution to the Constitution and the diminished role of scholars as political commentators over the last half century of public debate.

In The Story of America, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories--from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address--to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type. Part civics primer, part cultural history, The Story of America excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary. Along the way it presents fresh readings of Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, and "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as histories of lesser-known genres, including biographies of presidents, novels of immigrants, and accounts of the Depression. From past to present, Lepore argues, Americans have wrestled with the idea of democracy by telling stories. In this thoughtful and provocative book, Lepore offers at once a history of origin stories and a meditation on storytelling itself.

In The Story of America, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories--from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address--to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type. Part civics primer, part cultural history, The Story of America excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary. Along the way it presents fresh readings of Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, and "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as histories of lesser-known genres, including biographies of presidents, novels of immigrants, and accounts of the Depression. From past to present, Lepore argues, Americans have wrestled with the idea of democracy by telling stories. In this thoughtful and provocative book, Lepore offers at once a history of origin stories and a meditation on storytelling itself.

From Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jill Lepore, a history of American origin storiesIn The Story of America, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories—from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address—to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type.Part civics primer, part cultural history, The Story of America excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary. Along the way it presents fresh readings of Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, and "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as histories of lesser-known genres, including biographies of presidents, novels of immigrants, and accounts of the Depression.From past to present, Lepore argues, Americans have wrestled with the idea of democracy by telling stories. In this thoughtful and provocative book, Lepore offers at once a history of origin stories and a meditation on storytelling itself.

On January 6, 2021, more than two thousand rioters stormed the doors of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., hoping to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power from former president Donald Trump to his successor, Joseph Biden. The deaths, property damage, and vicious rampage that ensued were witnessed on live television as an unprecedented attack on the democratic process and those who strive to protect it. As an installment of UGA Press’s History in the Headlines series, this book offers a rich discussion between highly respected scholars on the historical backdrop and context for contemporary issues from the headlines. In addition to the historical context, this conversation demonstrates how historians speak to one another about contentious topics and how they contribute in meaningful ways to the public’s understanding of momentous events. This volume focuses on the historical context of the January 6 attack and employs a free-flowing conversation style that allows the historians a more unconventional format. The participants discuss if—and if so, how—historians should engage in public debates and what that engagement means to their roles as academic authorities in the public.

On January 6, 2021, more than two thousand rioters stormed the doors of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., hoping to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power from former president Donald Trump to his successor, Joseph Biden. The deaths, property damage, and vicious rampage that ensued were witnessed on live television as an unprecedented attack on the democratic process and those who strive to protect it. As an installment of UGA Press’s History in the Headlines series, this book offers a rich discussion between highly respected scholars on the historical backdrop and context for contemporary issues from the headlines. In addition to the historical context, this conversation demonstrates how historians speak to one another about contentious topics and how they contribute in meaningful ways to the public’s understanding of momentous events. This volume focuses on the historical context of the January 6 attack and employs a free-flowing conversation style that allows the historians a more unconventional format. The participants discuss if—and if so, how—historians should engage in public debates and what that engagement means to their roles as academic authorities in the public.

The United States was founded on a set of “self-evident” truths: political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But how well has the nation—from its revolutionary birth to our fractious present—lived up to these founding ideals? In an absorbing, character-driven narrative, acclaimed historian Jill Lepore engages this urgent question. Now expanded into a two-volume textbook, the Inquiry Edition is a new kind of history text—one that highlights the importance of analyzing evidence and practicing historical inquiry to help students develop civic skills relevant to their lives far beyond the course.

The United States was founded on a set of “self-evident” truths: political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But how well has the nation—from its revolutionary birth to our fractious present—lived up to these founding ideals? In an absorbing, character-driven narrative, acclaimed historian Jill Lepore engages this urgent question. Now expanded into a two-volume textbook, the Inquiry Edition is a new kind of history text—one that highlights the importance of analyzing evidence and practicing historical inquiry to help students develop civic skills relevant to their lives far beyond the course.

The United States was founded on a set of “self-evident” truths: political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But how well has the nation—from its revolutionary birth to our fractious present—lived up to these founding ideals? In an absorbing, character-driven narrative, acclaimed historian Jill Lepore engages this urgent question. Now expanded into a two-volume textbook, the Inquiry Edition is a new kind of history text—one that highlights the importance of analyzing evidence and practicing historical inquiry to help students develop civic skills relevant to their lives far beyond the course.

The United States was founded on a set of “self-evident” truths: political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But how well has the nation—from its revolutionary birth to our fractious present—lived up to these founding ideals? In an absorbing, character-driven narrative, acclaimed historian Jill Lepore engages this urgent question. Now expanded into a two-volume textbook, the Inquiry Edition is a new kind of history text—one that highlights the importance of analyzing evidence and practicing historical inquiry to help students develop civic skills relevant to their lives far beyond the course.

The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Although Silicon Valley likes to imagine that it has no past, the scientists of Simulmatics are almost undoubtedly the long-dead ancestors of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—or so argues Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, in this “hilarious, scathing, and sobering” (David Runciman) account of the origins of predictive analytics and behavioral data science.

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.

“Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of . . . the Artificial State,” writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore’s typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a “government without consent, even government without humans.” It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.

The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world but also one of the most difficult to amend. Jill Lepore, Harvard professor of history and law, explains why in We the People, the most original history of the Constitution in decades—and an essential companion to her landmark history of the United States, These Truths.Published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding—the anniversary, too, of the first state constitutions—We the People offers a wholly new history of the Constitution. “One of the Constitution’s founding purposes was to prevent change,” Lepore writes. “Another was to allow for change without violence.” Relying on the extraordinary database she has assembled at the Amendments Project, Lepore recounts centuries of attempts, mostly by ordinary Americans, to realize the promise of the Constitution. Yet nearly all those efforts have failed. Although nearly twelve thousand amendments have been introduced in Congress since 1789, and thousands more have been proposed outside its doors, only twenty-seven have ever been ratified. More troubling, the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Without recourse to amendment, she argues, the risk of political violence rises. So does the risk of constitutional change by presidential or judicial fiat.Challenging both the Supreme Court’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation and the flawed theory of “originalism,” Lepore contends in this “gripping and unfamiliar story of our own past” that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. The framers never intended for the Constitution to be preserved, like a butterfly, under glass, Lepore argues, but expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution through an orderly deliberative and democratic process.Lepore’s remarkable history seeks, too, to rekindle a sense of constitutional possibility. Congressman Jamie Raskin writes that Lepore “has thrown us a lifeline, a way of seeing the Constitution neither as an authoritarian straitjacket nor a foolproof magic amulet but as the arena of fierce, logical, passionate, and often deadly struggle for a more perfect union.” At a time when the Constitution’s vulnerability is all too evident, and the risk of political violence all too real, We the People, with its shimmering prose and pioneering research, hints at the prospects for a better constitutional future, an amended America.

AS HEARD ON RADIO 4'S WOMEN'S HOUR'America's greatest living essayist . . . Wonderful' Fintan O'TooleA panoptical vision of modern America, from the brilliant mind of Jill Lepore.The past decade has marked a shift in America's trajectory. Jill Lepore, the acclaimed writer and New Yorker columnist, has been tracing its contested storylines in real time, beginning with the run-up to Donald Trump's election, through to the chaos and confusion left in its wake. Here we encounter Americans' rising techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented - but armed - aimlessness.With the wit and verve that has made her the acclaimed national historian of a generation, these essays reflect on the consuming public fissures of this era: culture wars and the corrosion of the media; disruptive innovation and the future of technology; constitutional crises surrounding gun rights and the racial history behind the very language of insurrection. Balancing a penetrating personal lens with indispensable history, she makes sense of life in a moment of aberration and extremity that has left our political landscape forever changed.The American Beast offers an arresting portrait of America, capturing the tumultuous relationship between the country's violent past and fractured present.

AS HEARD ON RADIO 4'S WOMEN'S HOUR'A stunning mosaic of contemporary America' Fintan O'Toole'Essential reading, with quick insights and bomblets of surprise' TLSA panoptical vision of modern America, from the brilliant mind of Jill Lepore.The 2010s marked a shift in America's trajectory, beginning with the run-up to Donald Trump's election, through to the chaos and confusion left in its wake. With the wit and verve that has made her the acclaimed national historian of a generation, Jill Lepore reflects on the consuming fissures of this era: culture wars and media corrosion; disruptive innovation and techno-utopianism; constitutional crises surrounding gun rights and a reckoning with a deep history of racial violence. These essays make sense of American life in a moment of polarization, capturing the tumultuous relationship between the country's violent past and fractured present.Praise for Jill Lepore:'The pre-eminent historian of forgotten tales from America's past' David Runciman'A person can't help but feel inspired by the riveting intelligence and joyful curiosity of Lepore' George Saunders'Lepore writes history like a poet' Dan Snow'Lepore is that rare combination in modern life of intellect, originality and style' Amanda Foreman