But the myth is always simpler than the truth. A seemingly renegade idea, the severing of a people from another land-courageous, ballsy. Let’s take the American Revolution, for instance. I saw it as inevitable, maybe self-evident. I viewed history as a straight line, a collection of clearly defined and connected dots. But there was a lot more that I didn’t know or that I had understood incorrectly. I knew about the terrible legacy of slavery, of the millions of human beings forced onto ships, across oceans, onto land, where they were treated horribly, worked to death, and yet survived, generation after generation. I knew that this land wasn’t empty or fallow or wasted it was settled and loved and well cared for by the peoples native to it long before Europeans arrived. I knew about the Founding Fathers (though couldn’t name them all-as with Disney’s seven dwarfs, I always forgot at least one). When I set out to read this book and write this article, I had a general understanding of how the United States came to be.
What are the myths the United States has built itself on? Lepore’s question-the one the book explores-is more honed, adapted from statements by Alexander Hamilton: “Can a political society really be governed by reflection and election, by reason and truth, rather than by accident and violence, by prejudice and deceit?” Lepore’s answer is something like: Well, sometimes yes, and sometimes no, and in the past few decades, it kind of depends on who’s being asked. My birth certificate sufficed my ignorance was never questioned or corrected. I moved back here easily, when I was nineteen years old. I didn’t have to pass a test or learn about this country or understand any more of it than any non-American understands about the place that gave us McDonald’s, the Internet, the iPhone. The history I was taught from the ages of six to eighteen was both condensed and elongated, the history of a fledgling country full of war but also of an ancient people once enslaved and long persecuted.īut I was born in the U.S., which makes me a citizen. I was raised in Israel, a much younger country that was handed over by a colonizing force to a people desperate for a home back in the days-not so long ago, really-when colonizers could simply gift the land they’d taken as if it were theirs to give. A nine-hundred-plus-page tome, it is a full history of the United States, a country I was born in and soon after left. This thought kept blinking through my mind, like a neon sign on a dark street, as I read These Truths, the newest book by the Harvard professor and New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore.
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