The History Wars and America at 250, with the Historian Jill Lepore
5/15/202633 min
The two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence arrives during intense disputes about American history, as the Trump Administration demands a more glorifying view of the nation’s past at federally run historical sites and in federally funded projects. The staff writer Jill Lepore (who won the Pulitzer Prize in History this month for her book “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution”) guest-hosts a special episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour about this fraught moment, reflecting on the responsibility of academic historians to shape the public debate. She compares our moment with the bicentennial—which fell in the wake of the Vietnam War and the scandals of Richard Nixon’s Presidency—in a conversation with the Yale historian Beverly Gage. Lepore looks at the nature of the country’s war over history with Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School and a staff writer at The New Yorker. They discuss the Donald Trump-approved “Freedom 250” projection on the Washington Monument, and talk about how Americans can meaningfully participate in the semiquincentennial. If “we’re sitting around waiting for the occupant of the White House to tell us what American history means,” Lepore says, “you just kind of want to walk into traffic.”
Further reading:
- America at 250, a special issue of The New Yorker
- “Was the Declaration of Independence Better Before the Edits?,” by Jill Lepore
- “Scandal, Protest, Goofiness, and Grandeur at the U.S. Bicentennial,” by Jill Lepore
- “Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Complicated Commemorations,” by Jelani Cobb
- “This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History,” by Beverly Gage
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:01
[upbeat music] The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.
David Remnick· Host0:07
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. [upbeat music] Guess what? The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is nearly upon us, and to think about this occasion and what it means, I've asked Jill Lepore to join us. Jill's been a staff writer at The New Yorker for many years, and just this month she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book, We the People: A History of the US Constitution. Jill Lepore is a professor of history and law at Harvard University, and she's our host for today's program.
Jill Lepore· Host0:42
[upbeat music] Way back in the 1930s, in the dark days of the Great Depression, with democracy on the rocks, the US government hired more than 6,000 out-of-work writers for something called the Federal Writers' Project. They brought on all kinds of writers from newspaper reporters to playwrights, anybody who used to make some kind of a living by writing and couldn't anymore. Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, Richard Wright, they all got involved. Studs Terkel too. He got his start at the Federal Writers' Project. The government sent those writers out all over the country to talk to people, to listen to people, to chronicle