So little perspective on this moment, its quite impossible to say. I think the perception that many people in the United States and of course also around the world have that this is an extraordinary unusual time something we are the time out of time, will be curiosity in the future people will look back and wonder about that very wonderment i think its an interesting phenomenon. When you think about today do you compare it to any period in history . Jill lepore as a historian im interested in analogies we have a cognitive tendency to enjoy analogies to find d one thing to be like another all the time. Just in the same way and the kind of person that sees likenesses and family members, and look at a new baby and say, that looks just like great grandma someone so. Have the same time, even as they say i recognize a lot of that is minded perception, my need for familiarity. I think there has been for most of my career as a historian the question to ask historians is what time is this like. Thats a journalistic check i understand where that comes from for journalists its an easy story to write. I think theres a whole crop of president ial biographers who go out on talk shows and offer those analogies. I generally find them to be not especially useful and i certainly think in this era its actually a way to contain the chaos that is coupled because its a way to avoid confronting whats truly strange about this moment in time. Two years ago on a talk he gave on this book these truths, you said what we mean when we talk about American History . How are we to reckon with the fact that our r present day is polarized that we believe past as two different past, we can be in a bit agree on sharing the same ancestry of two people. a jill lepore i still stand by that statement. We do have our account of the nations past is this polarized as our sense of whats going on in the present. If anything the pastor doesnt change but our destruction has become more and more divided and more affected by partisan passion. Real passion. Thats been obvious to me as a historian for a really long time. I think its maybe more obvious to the public than its ever been before. Maybe got to the forward by recent conversation about monuments which whether confederate monuments should stand. Those sources have been going on for a very long time but they havent occupied the attention of the media and of a auntil really just the last year. We can pick about other controversies in the past the history of wars of the 1990s. Similar in terms of a public fight over the history of a particular era. I think that we have a kind of sense now that remember the crazy goofy internet meme about the blue dress and people saw it as blue and some people saw and gold, i never looked at it but thats the world in which we live that every piece of information that is available can be seen either the blue dress or the gold dress. That same fractured lands is now the spectacle of the past as well, it becomes, i say history but not because im not deeply fascinated about things that happen, and really interested on how it got here and interested in how People Struggle with in the past and what we can learn from fortitude in the face of suffering which is most of the story of humanity. I think its really distressing that people look to the past simply as a file drawer you can open up to olfind physician papers to justify your own politics. I was going to close with this but i think its pertinent now, this is from these truths, in their you write that the american experiment has not ended. A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. I think in the course of this conversation youre likely to throw something at me have written or said that i will not stand by that ive changed my my don, i change my mind all the time. Its a human creation, nations dont exist in nature. Humans dont naturally live in nations, its a thing humans have invented as a category of Political Community that in our area has proven extremely important because the liberal nationstate is the only Human Institution that can guarantee rights to people its really important. The United States is a particular place in the history of the rise of the liberal nations state and organization of the government through the consent of the people that can actually deliver to the people goods and services and the guarantee of rights. Nations are really important but to say that there ab doesnt mean to do something trivial evanescent. Nation is a fundamentally unstable thing. In some way, especially the united eastates which is a nati based on the idea not the shared heritage and really not certainly on shared history and really not on shared language or shared religion, its based on an idea. The idea that the nation seized to exist i think that is some of the daily anguish of people wondering whats gonna happen in the United States people look up the country from afar people dont believe in the idea anymore. Thats the perilous state that gives it the constant edginess of that chaos. Professor jill lepore, at what point did you say to yourself, i think i want to write a history of the United States and 800 some pages . Jill lepore [laughter] bive been asked to write like u. S. History textbooks throughout my career. Viewers know that my most College High School and textbooks are written by a team of scholars, historians, specializing in a period often and coached history so they might be 20th century ab usually it takes a team of scholars to put together a textbook that covers the whole story of the United States. Ive never been attracted to that as a project. I like to work cooperatively but as a textbook as a genre as a particular tone that is extremely unappealing to me as a writer. I think of myself as a writer. A few years ago, and i was asked for the first time to write history of the United States and i said, as a College Textbook i said id be very interested in doing that but i think theres actually a need for the history of the United States not for students but for the public as a whole. There used to be these books, there used to be a certain point every american historians career, this was always men would write this as a public abnone of them are the last of their kind, they just offer up at this moment in time, heres how this historian sees the story. That tradition has fallen away and really quite violently repudiated but means that there hasnt been a book like my history of the United States a long time. It seemed to me like something of a dare. To resurrect this loss to tradition. I worked with an editor and publisher i usually admire and they let me write the book that i wanted to write that offered the account that i thought needed to be written. Like in my decades of teaching American History and writing essays about American History books about American History, i said, okay, i will do it. For me it was important i write it quickly, i get really bored with books really fast. I also had this i wrote the book pretty quickly but i also had this idea viewers have read the book can respond to this, i had this idea that a but if i wrote it fast it would read fast. It would have a page turn momentum. I took on the project but very much of the idea i would spend x number of months on the project and no more and then move on. If it had been while you write history of the United States a thousand patrons you could spend 10 years on it and never have done that. Taken aldve do you start chronologically when you start a project like that . The book is quite strictly chronological, its not a compendium, its not a chronicle, its a history, it makes arguments, each chapter makes an argument, it has themes its not an encyclopedia. It aims to be significant in its ability to comprehend large swaths of events. I had a very particular method, the book has four parts, each one has four chapters a lot of symmetry to the organization and i made my outline and then went to the library and picked would need to write the first chapter and put them in a stack in my office and the at yellow sticky note and then walked over and got the 50 books for chapter two, three, four and then every time i got to the bottom of a stack i would write that chapter, return those books and then go get the stack for the next pause so i would have them on hand. Day by day worked my way through it year by year, it was actually really fun, i teach out of harvard and my office is not too far from the Library Building so i could check all the books back and forth every time but you have to check out the books of the circulation desk, you go to the abi knew the security guards pretty well, they also all came to know what i was doing so everybody would be paying attention, you have the new deal i cant wait till you get to truman, i want to ask questions about truman. All the security guards were following my progress and also recommending books, people read a lot of history. It was a farmer, there was people i checked out most. What got left out . Times got left out. One of the reasons it became so difficult and untenable for an academic historian to write a history of the United States a aall the people stripped out of the story of the United States for a century and and a half and historical tradition of scholars were just really quite provincial. They all belong to a single Demographic Group and were interested in the history of that Demographic Group and no other. It meant that we had a very narrow understanding even what politics is. Beginning in the 1960s women and people of color entered the academy and found womens studies programs and black history programs what became lgbtq, sex and gender studies, historians of science, this incredible expansion of the scope of what people and groups and topics with the proper object of American History and subject of american Historical Books really changed all those people that exploded the profession they thought nobody could write it to given such a broad understanding of the diversity of the american experience. How could you cram that into a single volume . It would involve a rhetorical act of violence an act of exclusion in certain groups in any case youd be kind of beaten up for what you left out or emphasized or what you failed to emphasize. Its an academic scholarship in any field is pretty punishing. Theres a lot of disincentive to do this kind of work. There was also the idea that youd be promoting a kind of fiction that the country was just one thing that could be reduced to one story, these are the years of not only intellectual ferment and the growth of the academy and Inclusion Diversity within the academy but kind of a political sensibility about many stories and the american past. It just seemed like an untenable project and fall als a thankless lproject. It did not get done for a really long time. I found that difficult. There were many nights i lay awake in bed making lists of all the things that t belonged the chapter i was writing that i knew i would be able to attend to. I wasnt writing an encyclopedia. A reader needs to know why information in the chapter in there has to actually be in support of some theme or claims you come up with rules with what needs to be there and what doesnt need to be there. Thats not to say they cant all be secondguessed but the way i eventually got myself to sleep instead of making those lists was to remember this is s not the last account for the United States i was trying to rekindle the tradition of attempting to make sense of the nations past. My hope would be that other people would come along and write similar books and would challenge and subvert, challenge my account and thats the nature thats how historical scholarship works. Its not really meant to be the end, its meant to be the beginning. What motivated your followup book this america . Jill lepore both of the books that i was asked to write, i dont think on my own i wouldve actually pursued either project. I was asked to write an essay for foreign affairs, the history of american nationalism. There was a time in 2018 viewers might remember trump gave a speech. I think he was at a Campaign Rally and he said he was explaining he said im a nationalist and he said Something Like i guess im not supposed to use that word but im a nationalist. I might be misremembering the details. Subsequently an interview someone asked about nationalism and the history of the world and its meaning and implication. He said he didnt care, that the point was he considered himself to be a nationalist or to find the word the way he wanted to define it. So in 2018 there was a lot of discussion about a kind of american nationalism. I was asked to write some kind of account of the history of american nationalism either in the context of National Movements or the idea of america as a nation. So i wrote an essay that was about that but about what was a national his slurry does and the that i was asked to turn the essay into a short book. I think i say in the preface of the book, i wanted to explain what a nation is and why nationstates matter and what liberal nationalism is and why it matters and how it is in the absence of the defense of liberalism dealing with a kind of nationalism that comes to the liberal and that was the danger, the book is a defense of liberal nationalism. We will get into those definitions in just a minute but we happen to have that video of President Trump in october 2018 in houston. You know what a globalist is, right . A globalist is the one who wants to abthe globe to do well, frankly not caring about our country so much. We cannot have that. They have a word, sort of became oldfashioned. Its called a nationalist, i say really, were not supposed to use that word. You know what i am, im a nationalist. [cheering] nationalist. Use that word. [cheering] professor jill lepore, when you hear the president say im a nationalist what does that say to you . I think the context as a whole is so interesting to hear that. I dont have video in this exchange are not looking at what the viewers are looking at and i think the video is probably significantly richer in terms of the spirit of the occasion. Because there is something about calling out and celebrating nationalism before oan adoring crowd that i think for a lot of people who watched nationalists rise to power in order to secure the unclenching fidelity of the people for the purpose of acts of aggression, its a very unsettling if not terrifying thing to bear witness to. And really stricken, i had forgotten how he begins by defining a globalist which is really interesting because historically the rhetoric about globalism and globalists in particular is often fundamentally antisomatic. And history of the formation of nationstates jews were often people without a nation. Nationstate emergence in the 18th and 19th century and nationalism, the fidelity to a nation to a nationstate as a core commitment of many people around the world tend to release set to one side people who are stateless so that includes the basques or jews, and a lot of conspiracy theories for the 18th and 19th century are fundamentally antisomatic in the sense that they are based on the idea there is a secret cabal of jewish people who are bankers who control all the money. That these people have no National Attachment have global ties that are undermining national borders. When the rhetoric about globalists comes back in our day it really harkens back to the long tradition of the invocation of the International Conspiracy of jewish bankers. There is something really interesting about that. Not to say that, there are very strenuous and i think important retakes of globalization to be made, i think one of the chief criticisms of liberals or the ed progressives 1990s bill clinton arrow forward, even into the late 1980s but through obama is the kind of embrace of globalism and a sense that certain people will be left behind by globalization but thats okay. Its for the best. There is a real critique of globalization that i think people watching trump and who admire trump and feel recognized and seen by him when he says that our thinking about all the ways in which globalization has really been responsible for a great deal of the widening income of the quality around the world. Its an interesting mix of there are people really angry about whats going on, what went on in the beginning of the 90s. The fantasy of globalization. For trump to invoke nationalism very much to applaud what he is absolutely presenting as a no liberal nationalism is kind of a classic work of liberal nationalist. Where the important things that people who do make that move do, to kind of define globalists and it has this whole antisomatic history of demotic bad people, people who love the nation this nation best are the good people and their love is simply another form of patriotism. The consortium of nationalism and patriotism is like a central move its an essential step in urging people to be willing to make sacrifices for the nation that can only be asked in the interest of an authoritarian. There is a messy history behind that. One of the things i tried to do by writing this short book was to kind of pause and look at, whats the difference between patriotism and offer something up, when people say nationalism now they generally only ever been ill liberal nationalism, not the liberal kind ntbecause liberals wont defend nationalist. I will, i think its important to love your country. I think its important to be willing into to be willing to think about your obligations to your country. And the civic duty that we owe to one another. Thats the thing that i believe i think is central to the project of any liberal nationstate. I think its a vanishingly small space to occupy when everybody is talking about nationalism is talking about hating other people rather than loving the people of your own country. Whats the difference between a nationalist and a