Jill Lepore
American historian, Harvard professor, and New Yorker staff writer, best known for These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), a single-volume narrative history of the country from its founding to the present.
Lepore built her reputation on archivally grounded books that retrieve overlooked figures and episodes: A is for American (communication and national identity), Joe Gould’s Teeth (a New Yorker obsessive and the limits of oral history), The Secret History of Wonder Woman, and a biography of Jane Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s largely unrecorded sister. She co-wrote the 18th-century novel Blindspot with historian Jane Kamensky to animate the lives of ordinary people outside the founding-father biography genre. A recurring preoccupation across her work is what gets encoded, suppressed, or simply lost in the archive — the silos of stored information that historians must locate, carry across, and interpret.
Core positions
Lepore’s signal methodological commitment is to the distance between historical moments rather than their similarity. Against the instinct to collapse past and present into analogies (‘Trump is like Jackson’), she argues for pulling the accordion wide open: studying the transformation between two points, not the resemblance at the endpoints. She applies the same logic to constitutional originalism, which she treats as a form of historical compression that erases 230 years of struggle.
On American political life, she argues that the right to privacy — the constitutional doctrine anchoring reproductive rights since Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) — was built on a tainted foundation: an 1890 article by Brandeis and Warren motivated by men’s discomfort with photography making women visible. She holds that rights to reproduction were better grounded in equal protection or liberty, and that the privacy framing has ‘backfired as a matter of legal discourse.’ More broadly, she diagnoses a structural mismatch between America’s representative system of government and its citizens’ belief in direct democracy, a gap that social media and instant polling have widened.
In the wiki
- Jill Lepore on Traveling through Time — Conversations with Tyler, Ep. 24: historical reasoning, constitutional law, Stuart Little, and working-class origins inside elite institutions