To protect their claim, titleholders bloated history with myths, distortions and lies, abridging the potential of the founding truths. The successes of the LGBT movement are one recent historic example, which Lepore presents in the last chapter, a superb retrospective of the 21st century. Lepore chisels deep to understand their place in the American experience, framing her narrative not as an homage but inquiry: “Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?” In other words, to what extent have government and society accepted them as the province of all or some of the people - whites and nonwhites men and women native-born and immigrant? The answer is that organized efforts have painstakingly chipped away at the stony intransigence that has impaired the viability of these truths since their conception. Convention in writing American history once called for constructing a grand narrative memorializing the presumed success of these principles, like a stonemason turning a monument out of granite. This arc of the unflattering rises from long-simmering conflicts over the intent and meaning of the nation’s founding principles, what Thomas Jefferson called “these truths”: popular sovereignty, political equality and natural rights. History doesn’t repeat itself it persists. As Lepore shows, the partisan recriminations, righteous lawlessness, false facts, fake news, bogus populism and boorish executive leadership that we see as a reflection of our time is an outgrowth of the past.

It is probed and analyzed and dislodged from the past, presented as a force that resonates in the present. History in Lepore’s nimble hands is more than the telling of tales. Ranging from European settlement to Trumpian tweets, “These Truths” is a perceptive and necessary contribution to understanding the American condition of late. The title of her best-selling “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” could easily be confused as autobiographical. She is also a professor of history at Harvard, the author of 11 books (one is a co-written novel), and the winner and finalist of major book prizes - and she’s only at midcareer. The book is a seamless web of them, in the way that Lepore sees history. A staff writer for The New Yorker, she is known for smart, absorbing stories.

The Iron Words by Michael Fridgen