Status
Publication
Description
"From the best-selling author of These Truths, a work that examines the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century. At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Harvard historian Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America. Since the end of the Cold War, Lepore writes, American historians have largely retreated from the idea of 'the nation,' in part because postmodernism has corroded faith in grand narratives, and in part because the rise of political nationalism has rendered it suspect and unpalatable. Bucking this trend, however, Lepore argues forcefully that the nation demands scrutiny. Without an honest reckoning with America's collective past, we will be at the mercy of unscrupulous demagogues who spin their own version of the national story for their own purposes. 'When serious historians abandon the study of the nation,' Lepore tellingly writes, 'nationalism doesn't die. Instead, it eats liberalism.' A trenchant work of political philosophy as well as a reclamation of America's national history, This America asks us to look our nation's sovereign past square in the eye to reveal not only a history of contradictions, but a path of promise for the future"--… (more)
User reviews
January 3, 2020
Nations, the author argues, are not usually comprised of people related by origin or ethnicity, but a common geography, and knitted
The final chapter, of course, is much against Trump and his supporters, and also chides historians for no longer writing a story of the nation, since they have thought that liberalism had won and destroyed nationalism during the global nineties.
I agree with her stance for universal rights and equality under law.