These Truths:
A History of the United States

By Jill Lepore, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2018, 789 pages, followed by Acknowledgements, Notes and Index.
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, May 26, 2022

Can a history book be great if it includes factual mistakes?

In Jill Lepore’s much-praised “These Truths,” I have a lot of trouble forgiving the sloppy history, such as:

On Page 505, in a long paragraph summarizing the Allied invasion of Europe known as D-Day, Lepore wrote of the chaotic, bloody landings: “A fleet of bombers and fighter jets attacked from the sky.” Ahem. Fighters, sure, but from my research – OK, yeah, I’m trusting the internet – I conclude that propeller-powered aircraft, no jets, were used on June 6, 1944.

On Page 629, in describing the 1968 Democratic Party presidential primary in New Hampshire, she wrote: “An antiwar candidate, Minnesota congressman Eugene McCarthy had polled 42 percent.” Close. The name is right, and yeah, a Democrat from Minnesota. But McCarthy was a senator.

And on Page 748 is an assertion about “During Barack Obama’s 2003 Senate bid, he called the Patriot Act ‘a good example of fundamental principles being violated,’ … .” It is true that the future president started campaigning for the U.S. Senate in 2003; however, the actual election was in November of 2004. The quotation itself may be from 2003, but traditionally, we refer to a “Senate bid” by the year of the election.

The problem with calling your book a “history” is that when three such glaring errors pop up, the non-history-scholar reader – I am one – cannot help but wonder: What mistakes did I not notice in a book that I was hoping to better educate me?

Lepore’s attempt to summarize U.S. history in 789 pages is ambitious in its attempt to be both big – Who else but that singular “broad-shouldered sea captain from Genoa” is quoted in the book’s first line of text? – and microscopic: Did you know that U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall’s original first name was “Thoroughgood,” but in second grade, he started spelling it “Thurgood?”

The big was disappointing. Lepore is competent and occasionally – meaning not often enough – insightful. Two-thirds of the way through the book, she focuses on the 1960 presidential election: Kennedy, born to wealth and groomed at Choate and Harvard, represented everything Nixon detested: all that Nixon had fought for, by tooth and claw had been handed to Kennedy, on a platter decorated with a doily.

Eh. The “everything Nixon detested” is lazy and obvious, the same theme everyone who ever covered, researched or read about Nixon knew. Even I knew it. The “on a platter” and “tooth and claw” are clichés, and Lepore gets no extra credit for swapping out “nail” for “claw.” I did smile at “with a doily,” however.

I kept expecting Leporte have an overpowering theme that would make me think, or at least feel, that my existing opinion of American history had been wrong, and that her original discoveries were steering me in a new direction. But she covered such obvious material – the scourge of slavery, the cruelty of the white race’s westward expansion, the rise of near-lethal polarization – that what I mostly received were reminders, not revelations.

Some of those revelations were comprehensive and insightful, such as her excoriating of both polling and political consulting. And Lepore practically strongarmed me into accepting that a character I mostly had dismissed as a crank, Phyllis Schlafly, was, in reality, a brilliant political practitioner:

But she was … ruthless, and she learned, and people who underestimated her nearly always regretted it. Tying the (Equal Rights Amendment) to abortion was a stroke of political genius. To better debate her opponents, and realizing that much of this political battle would be waged in the courts, Schlafly earned a law degree in the 1970s. She was not a flake; she was as keen as the most cunning battlefield general.

Schlafly, who died in 2016 but not before endorsing Donald Trump for president, already was prominent before “These Truths,” but Lepore’s admiration for her was a surprise, a specialty of Lepore’s. Her real strength is her ability to find four-leaf clovers in the sprawling meadow of America: tiny Benjamin Lay, who fought slavery in the early 18th century; Mary Moore of Salisbury, N.C., who amid the horrors of the Civil War wrote this message to her governor: Our Husbands and Sons are now separated from us by the cruel war not only to defend their humbly homes but the homes and property of the rich man; Ella Baker, who spent years working for the NAACP, but, wearied by its passivity, helped create the more ambitious, aggressive Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

In other words, I did learn, I do value a 21st century look at my country, so I’m not sorry I read “These Truths.” But I usually go for hours-long stretches of reading, and with this book, I barely got through four pages at a sitting.

Here’s my irrational theory: “These Truths” was published in 2018, well into the Trump presidency. Lepore had seen book after book spitting venom at Trump’s turbulent performance. Seeking a story that wouldn’t be an echo, she tried to connect Columbus with Trump, and she rushed the whole project into print while Trump was still a thing. (She needn’t have worried.) That might explain the sloppy writing and-or inattentive editing that riddled a well-meaning history with such prose misdemeanors:

• On Rush Limbaugh’s style: “(H)e ranted and he raved.”

• Gaudy, “look-at-me” alliterations: “Obama’s second term was marked by battles over budgets and the mire of the Middle East.”

• Another cliché, this one about the delegates to the Second Continental Congress who: “… brought stories of trials and tribulations.”

Plus the typos. On Page 195, in a section on industrial progress in the 1830s, is this sentence: “Factories accelerated production, canals acceleration transportation.” Um, maybe, but what those “canals” really need was a verb.

Only three pages later, there is this: “America writers, refuting Carlyle, argued that … .” Two problems there: Should be “American writers,” and if those writers were really only “argu(ing),” then they were “rebutting,” not “refuting.”

On Page 755, the possessive case, as it will every writer, vexes Lepore. In a section on 21st-century right-wing media, a sentence compares Glenn Beck’s activities with those of others: “If Beck’s campaign was different from Alex Jones and the truthers, it drew the same animus and exploited the same history of racial hatred.” The possessive can be a nuisance, but it is, like our shared and sometimes shameful American history, a burden we must endure; should be, “… from Alex Jones’ (campaign) and the truthers’ (campaign) …”

Toss in a “pled” here (should be “pleaded”) and a “snuck” there (should be “sneaked”), and it’s a history book I’m glad I read, but I’m doubly glad that, for me at least, it is finally history.