For her, the United States has always been a nation wrestling with a paradox, caught between its sunny ideals and its darker realities. Lepore, who tells this dual story splendidly in her new book, These Truths, declines the temptation either to condemn the national project or to celebrate it. Those on the right might counter that the majority of white Americans never owned a single slave, and that the founders’ belief in individual freedom eventually led the country to abolish the “peculiar institution.” On the left, most would undoubtedly see it as clear evidence that the United States was founded on a despicable lie: The wigged icon who prattled on about “freedom” owed his wealth and status to the coerced labor of black men and women. The tale of the two Washingtons can serve as a kind of historical Rorschach test. It would be only his first stop on a frustrating odyssey of liberation.

On the day the last British ships sailed out of New York harbor, the general-politician grandly toasted “the memory of those heroes who have fallen for our freedom” and vowed, “May America be an Asylum to the persecuted of the earth!” Harry, a black man born in Gambia, was George’s personal property-or had been until he escaped from the Mount Vernon plantation in 1776, signing up with a British regiment that promised him and every other slave their liberty if they fought against the Patriots. George, of course, commanded the Continental Army that defeated Great Britain and then became the first president of the United States his immense popularity helped legitimize the government of the early republic. The parallel lives of Harry and George Washington illustrate the contradictions embedded in the nation’s story from birth. One group hopes to see America become great again the other claims that such golden age thinking is a fantasy of the privileged. No, insist most conservatives, it’s a narrative of individuals striving for liberty, who got stymied, at times, by meddlesome progressives and riotous radicals. It’s the story of a white man’s empire, many scholars on the left contend, against which dissenters of all races and genders have struggled to create a truly democratic society. And the argument a historian makes about America’s long, turbulent, and demographically complex past-from the arrival of the first European settlers in the sixteenth century to the triumph of Donald Trump-depends upon the story she chooses to tell.

“To write history is to make an argument by telling a story,” Jill Lepore once explained.

These truths lepore review