‘The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril’

The book was supposed to end with the inauguration of Barack Obama. That was Jill Lepore’s plan when she began work in 2015 on her new history of America, These Truths (W.W. Norton). She had arrived at the Civil War when Donald J. Trump was elected. Not to alter the ending, she has said, would have felt like “a dereliction of duty as a historian.”

These Truths clocks in at 789 pages (nearly 1,000 if you include the notes and index). It begins with Christopher Columbus and concludes with you-know-who. But the book isn’t a compendium; it’s an argument. The American Revolution, Lepore shows, was also an epistemological revolution. The country was built on truths that are self-evident and empirical, not sacred and God-given. “Let facts be submitted to a candid world,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. Now, it seems, our faith in facts has been shaken. These Truths traces how we got here.

Lepore occupies a rarefied perch in American letters. She is a professor at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has written books about King Philip’s War, Wonder Woman, and Jane Franklin, sister of Benjamin Franklin. She even co-wrote an entire novel in mock 18th-century prose. The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has said of Lepore: “More successfully than any other American historian of her generation, she has gained a wide general readership without compromising her academic standing.”

Lepore spoke with The Chronicle Review about how the American founding inaugurated a new way of thinking, the history of identity politics, and whether she’s tired of people asking about her productivity.

Q. These Truths is a civics book, which used to be more common. Then they became kind of untenable, and even looked down on by academic historians.

A. This kind of book written by a single author for a general readership is an unusual effort. It hasn’t been done often, though it used to be a routine capstone endeavor of a certain sort of notable historian. It became untenable when the historical profession became bigger and broader. In the 1960s, women and people of color got Ph.D.s and revolutionized the study of the past. They incorporated those whose experiences and especially whose politics had been left out. You can think of that, and I certainly do, as an incredible explosion of historical research that was profoundly important and urgently necessary. But you can also think of it as shattering an older story of America.

Post-1968 or so, the kind of book you get is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Zinn was a political scientist. The book was an outgrowth of his work in the antiwar movement. It’s a Marxist reckoning with American atrocity. On the other side of the political spectrum, there emerged the American triumphalism of popular history. It’s in this era that academics retreat and what the public reads is presidential history written chiefly by journalists — the McCullough/Meacham tradition of the journalist who writes about men and power.

Q. Why did you write this book?

A. An editor at the college division at Norton asked if I would write a U.S.-history textbook; there’s never been one written by a woman. I’m not sure that’s why they asked me to do it, but that’s objectively true. I’ve been asked to contribute to textbooks before, but I’ve said no because textbook writing doesn’t appeal to me. I think there are a lot of problems with textbook writing. But I adore Norton textbooks. And I thought maybe I should try to pull together all the bits and pieces of American history I had taught and written about over the years. The absence of that kind of a book, not a textbook but a trade book, strikes me as a problem for our public culture.

If on the one hand we have a bunch of academic historians saying American history consists of conflict among groups who are generally powerless relative to the federal government, and on the other hand we have a public history that is about the power of the presidency and that ignores conflict among groups, you just have partisanship. So I countered to Norton and said I’d like to write that textbook but I want to first write a trade book. That felt urgent.

Q. You mentioned that these books are traditionally capstone efforts. What should we read into that?

A. Like I’m about to retire?

Q. I’m just asking.

A. This sort of book takes a certain audacity. I could not have written it 20 years ago. It stands on the work of the last half century of historical scholarship. It also stands on decades of teaching. For me too, for the last 12 or 13 years, I’ve been writing for The New Yorker, where, although I was trained as a 17th- and 18th-century historian, most of my writing is about how we got from the 17th century to now, tracing change over time. So for me, These Truths is a capstone in the sense of being the product of decades of essay writing, lecture giving, seminar leading.

Q. America’s founding marked not only a new era of politics, but also a new way of thinking.

A. I call the book These Truths to invoke those truths in the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson describes, with the revision provided by Franklin, as “self-evident” — political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But I’m also talking about an unstated fourth truth, which is inquiry itself. Anyone who has spent time with the founding documents and the political and intellectual history in which they were written understands that the United States was founded quite explicitly as a political experiment, an experiment in the science of politics. It was always going to be subject to scrutiny. That scrutiny is done not from above by some commission, but by the citizenry itself.

Q. For democracy to work, of course, the people must be well informed. Yet we live in an age of epistemological mayhem. How did the relationship between truth and fact come unwound?

A. I spend a lot of time in the book getting it wound, to be fair. There’s an incredibly rich scholarship on the history of evidence, which traces its rise in the Middle Ages in the world of law, its migration into historical writing, and then finally into the realm that we’re most familiar with, journalism. That’s a centuries-long migration of an idea that begins in a very particular time and place, basically the rise of trial by jury starting in 1215. We have a much better vantage on the tenuousness of our own grasp of facts when we understand where facts come from.

The larger epistemological shift is how the elemental unit of knowledge has changed. Facts have been devalued for a long time. The rise of the fact was centuries ago. Facts were replaced by numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries as the higher-status unit of knowledge. That’s the moment at which the United States is founded as a demographic democracy. Now what’s considered to be most prestigious is data. The bigger the data, the better.

That transformation, from facts to numbers to data, traces something else: the shifting prestige placed on different ways of knowing. Facts come from the realm of the humanities, numbers represent the social sciences, and data the natural sciences. When people talk about the decline of the humanities, they are actually talking about the rise and fall of the fact, as well as other factors. When people try to re-establish the prestige of the humanities with the digital humanities and large data sets, that is no longer the humanities. What humanists do comes from a different epistemological scale of a unit of knowledge.

Q. How is the academy implicated in or imperiled by this moment of epistemological crisis?

A. The academy is largely itself responsible for its own peril. The retreat of humanists from public life has had enormous consequences for the prestige of humanistic ways of knowing and understanding the world.

Universities have also been complicit in letting sources of federal government funding set the intellectual agenda. The size and growth of majors follows the size of budgets, and unsurprisingly so. After World War II, the demands of the national security state greatly influenced the exciting fields of study. Federal-government funding is still crucial, but now there’s a lot of corporate money. Whole realms of knowing are being brought to the university through commerce.

I don’t expect the university to be a pure place, but there are questions that need to be asked. If we have a public culture that suffers for lack of ability to comprehend other human beings, we shouldn’t be surprised. The resources of institutions of higher learning have gone to teaching students how to engineer problems rather than speak to people.

Q. The university has been convulsed by debates around identity politics. You point out that identity politics, by other names, has always played a role in American life.

A. It’s impossible to talk about without pissing off a whole bunch of people no matter what you say, which is a flag that something is terribly wrong about the framing of the conversation.

Making political claims that are based on identity is what white supremacy is. To the degree that we can find that in the early decades of the country, it’s the position taken by, say, John C. Calhoun or Stephen Douglas arguing against Abraham Lincoln. The whole Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858 comes down to Douglas saying, Our forefathers founded this country for white men and their posterity forever. And Lincoln, following on the writings of black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and David Walker and Maria Stewart, says, No, that’s just not true! Lincoln read in the founding documents a universal claim of political equality and natural rights, the universality of the sovereignty of the people, not the particularity. Anyone who makes an identity-based claim for a political position has to reckon with the unfortunate fact that Stephen Douglas is their forebear, not Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass.

Q. Are you concerned that the academic left’s embrace of identity politics has led to an erosion of open debate on campuses?

A. This strikes me as a goofy issue, a manufactured controversy. My experience is that students come to college to debate ideas and damn it, that’s what they’re going to do. The no-platform movement started on the right and only migrated to the left in the 1970s, so historically this isn’t a left-right issue. But it’s been mobilized to be one. That said, I do care a lot about the issue, and I come down on the side of free speech, which is the side of liberalism — liberalism in the broadest sense, not the partisan sense. Free speech was the slogan of abolitionists; free speech was the slogan of women’s rights; free speech was the slogan of Ida B. Wells: That history is important, and still matters. But I reject the meaningless, partisan battle over it. It’s a distraction from deeper issues. Should Milo Yiannopoulos be allowed to speak on a particular campus? That has nothing to do with serious issues.

Q. The last chapter of These Truths is titled “America, Disrupted,” and it traces the rise of ideas from the tech world, like innovation. You point out that innovation was traditionally seen as something to be wary of.

A. It’s true that the last chapter is about disruptive innovation, but it’s also true that the book starts with the history of writing as a technology. Reading “America, Disrupted” in isolation might seem like I have some beef with Silicon Valley — which may or may not be the case — but reading that chapter after the 15 that come before makes it clear that what I have is a deep and abiding interest in technology and communication.

Innovation as an idea in America is historically a negative thing. Innovation in politics is what is to be condemned: To experiment recklessly with a political arrangement is fatal to our domestic tranquillity. So there’s a lot of anti-innovation language around the founding, especially because Republicanism — Jeffersonianism — is considered excessively innovative. Innovation doesn’t assume its modern sense until the 1930s, and then only in a specialized literature.

Disruption has a totally different history. It’s a way to avoid the word “progress,” which, even when it’s secularized, still implies some kind of moral progress. Disruption emerges in the 1990s as progress without any obligation to notions of goodness. And so “disruptive innovation,” which became the buzzword of change in every realm in the first years of the 21st century, including higher education, is basically destroying things because we can and because there can be money made doing so. Before the 1990s, something that was disruptive was like the kid in the class throwing chalk. And that’s what disruptive innovation turned out to really mean. A little less disruptive innovation is called for.

Q. Your first big volley on this topic came in The New Yorker in 2014. Does the innovation mind-set continue to hold such sway within higher education?

A. I think there’s quite a bit more caution now than when I wrote that essay. That was the high point of heedlessness, when the big thing to be celebrated was blowing up the newspapers. The reason I wrote the essay, after a great deal of unwillingness, was because The New York Times had produced an internal report that was a brief for how the Times needed to become more like BuzzFeed. I thought it was completely bananas. Institutions that mattered to public culture were being dismantled, and institutions in which how we know what we know can be arbitrated — journalism, the academy — were being destroyed.

Q. You mentioned having been unwilling for a long time to write about disruptive innovation. Why?

A. I was super hesitant because it involved writing about the work of a member of the faculty to which I belong [Clayton M. Christensen], even if the business school is quite a distance intellectually from here.

Also, when I first read all the work, I thought: This is bunk. This doesn’t seem serious enough for me to spend time on. So part of my hesitation was, like, people really buy this stuff? Months passed and then that New York Times report came out and I realized that people buy this so much that the New York Times is remaking itself in the image of this theory.

I wasn’t wrong to anticipate that it’d be controversial to say what I had to say. A lot of the response to it seemed to be about authority. Silicon Valley people were like, Who is this girl who thinks she can argue against us? It’s not unrelated to my decision to write These Truths. When my Wonder Woman book came out, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a cartoon of me as Wonder Woman. I was appalled. It was an incredible trivialization of a female academic who writes serious intellectual and political history to depict me dressed as a character I had identified as coming from the visual culture of pornography. It remains startling to me how little many men have to do to earn intellectual authority, and how much more women have to do to earn intellectual authority. It is stolen from them, it is undermined. I began to think I shouldn’t say no when I’m asked to write a big sweeping account of American history. There can be no mistaking it for lacking ambition. Plenty of people belittle the contributions of women, but they should never take on the smaller project when the bigger one excites them.

Q. You did your graduate work at Yale in the early ’90s in a post-structuralist American-studies department. You read a lot of Derrida and Foucault. You’ve said that you grew uncomfortable with how you were trained versus how you wanted to write.

A. I should say that I happened to land at a place where there were people writing in their own way. John Demos was my adviser. I also worked with Bill Cronon, who’s a tremendous writer. And Jon Butler. All of whom read my dissertation prospectus and said, OK, this is not a dissertation prospectus but we’re going to pass it because we love it. They were the exception.

Like any Ph.D. program, what you’re being trained to do is employ a jargon that instantiates your authority in the abstruseness of your prose. You display what you know by writing in a way that other people can’t understand. That’s not how I understand writing. Writing is about sharing what you know with storybook clarity, even and especially if you’re writing about something that’s complicated or morally ambiguous. Also, I like to write about people who are characters, who have limbs and fingers and toes and loves and desires and agonies and triumphs and ages and hair colors. But that’s not how historical writing is taught in a Ph.D. program.

Q. You must be the only person to start a journal article stroking Noah Webster’s hair.

A. I was very tentative about writing that essay. I am that person in the archives breaking into laughter or crying. I’m very moved by dead people and their ecstasies, agonies, and senses of humor. I’m always being shushed in the archives.

Q. In your 2010 book, The Whites of Their Eyes, about the rise of the Tea Party, you note that Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970, was one of the last academic historians to reach readers outside the academy “with sweeping interpretations both of the past and of his own time.” You seem to occupy a Hofstadter-like space in American life. How do you see your role?

A. You can see in Hofstadter’s life why so many academics from his generation and the generation that followed retreated. Hofstadter was stricken by student protests at Columbia. Something had gone wrong in American political life, which had become zealous. It would be best for historians to therefore not be part of it.

Since serious academic historians have to a large degree retreated, that space is taken up by other people. Again, generally by presidential historians, most of them journalists. That’s not to say they’re not excellent journalists and brilliant biographers. But what they write is presidential history, and what they offer is political punditry that emphasizes the power of the presidency. Just this week I was frantically reading about the attempted assassinations, possibly, of Trump critics, and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and I just knew I was going to see Michael Beschloss tell a story about LBJ. That’s the casting call for the historian. I’m not convinced that it’s a great contribution, especially when you think of the incredible work scholars do studying patterns of political expression, social movements, the history of political violence; none of that is gathered up in a one-clause quote from Michael Beschloss. What I’ve tried to do in The New Yorker is figure out a different way for a historian to offer a contribution. It doesn’t refuse to engage with what’s going on in the present, but it also doesn’t offer up the comforting anecdote or the disquieting anecdote.

Q. Hofstadter, of course, was part of a profession that was mostly white and male. Is These Truths the first solo-authored single-volume history of America written by a woman?

A. That’s what I’ve been told. I’m not sure I 100 percent stand by it, but as far as I know that is true.

Q. You get asked about your productivity a lot. I gather it’s a question you don’t like.

A. I sometimes say to people — this is like a 1930s thing to say, you can picture Barbara Stanwyck saying it in a noir film — it’s like complimenting a girl on her personality. It’s not about “You do good work,” it’s about “You do a lot of work.”

For a lot of people writing is an agony; it’s a part of what we do as scholars that they least enjoy. For me writing is a complete and total joy, and if I’m not writing I’m miserable. I have always written a lot. For years, before I wrote for The New Yorker, I wrote an op-ed every day as practice and shoved it in a drawer. It’s not about being published, it’s about the desire to constantly be writing. It’s such a strongly felt need that if it was something socially maladaptive it would be considered a vice.

Evan Goldstein is editor of The Chronicle Review. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.