[laughter] guest i think we have so little perspective on this moment that it is 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 uni shall time is something that we are in a time out of time will be a curiosity in the future. People will look back and wonder about that very sense i think it is kind of an interesting phenomenon. I think that will be studied. Host when you think about today, do you compare it to any other period in history . Guest no, you know, as a historian, im interested in analogies. I think we have a cognitive tendency to enjoy analogies to find one thing to be like another, all the time, just in the same way, you know, im the kind of person that sees likenesses in family members. I look at a new baby and say oh that looks just like great grandma so and so. But at the same time, even as i say that, i recognize that a lot of that is my need for familiarity. I think there has been for most of my career as a historian the question that journalists always ask historians is what time is this like . Thats a journalistic tick i understand where it comes from. For journalists it is an easy story to write. This reminds me of fdr. I think theres a whole crop of president ial biographers who go out on talk shows and offer up those kinds of analogies. I generally find them to be not especially useful. I certainly think in this era it is actually a way to kind of contain the chaos that isnt helpful because it is a way to avoid confronting what is truly strange about this moment in time. Host two years ago, during a talk you gave on your book these truths, you said what do we mean when we talk about American History . How are we to reckon with the fact that our present day is so polarized that we believe that the past is two different paths, we cant even imagine sharing a common ancestry as a people, and that seems to me a fairly peril state of affairs. Guest i still stand by that statement. We do have our account of nations past is just as polarized as our sense of whats going on in the present. If anything, the past hasnt changed, but our perception of it has become more and more divided and more inflected by partisan passion, you know, 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 floor by the recent conversation about monuments which, you know, whether the confederate monuments should stand. Those conversations have been going on for a very very long time but they havent occupied the attention of the media and a broad part of the public until really the last year. We can think about other controversies in the past. You know, the history wars of the 90s or there are moments in 19s and 20s that are somewhat similar in terms of the public fight over the history of a particular era. But i im sorry, go ahead. Host no, go ahead, finish. Guest i think we have kind of a daily sense that, you know, remember the crazy goofy internet meme about the blue dress. Some people thought it was blue. Some people thought it was gold. I never looked at it, but that is the world in which we live now, that everything every piece of information that is available can be seen either as a blue dress or gold dress. That same kind of fractured lens is now the spectacles with which we look upon the past as well. It becomes really i think i say history because im deeply fascinated by things that happened in the olden times. Im really interested in how we got here and im interested in how people struggled in the past and what we can learn from frankly the fortitude in face of suffering which is humanity. I think it is distressing people look to the past that they try to justify their politics. Host i was going to close with this but i think it is pertinent. You write the american experiment is not ended. A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. Guest yeah, i think in the course of this conversation youre likely to throw something at me that ive written and i would not stand by, and i change my mind all the time. Thats just a truism. A nation is an artifice; right . Nations dont exist in nature. Bees live in hives. Cows live in herds. And those are natural communities. Humans dont naturally live in nations, right . It is a thing that humans have invented as a category of Political Community that in our era has proven extremely important because the liberal nation state is the only Human Institution that can guarantee rights to people. It is really important. The United States has a particular place in the history of the rise of the liberal nation state, an organization of a government through the consent of the people that can actually deliver to the people goods and services and the guarantee of rights. So nations are really really important. To say theres an artifice doesnt mean that theyre you know, that they are something trivial, but a nation is a fundamentally unstable thing, like we have to in some way, especially the United States, which is a nation based on an idea, not the shared heritage and really not on a shared history, not even really on a shared language or shared religion. The United States is based on an idea. If you dont believe in the idea, the nation kind of ceases to exist. I think thats, you know, some of the daily anguish of people wondering whats going to happen in the United States. People from here and looking at the country from abroad, people are like do people not believe in the idea anymore . Thats the constant edginess of that chaos. Professor jill lepore at what point did you say to yourself yeah i think i want to write a history of the United States in 800 some pages . I have been asked to write like u. S. History textbooks throughout my career. You know, viewers may know that most textbooks are written in a team of scholars, an approach. It usually puts 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 collaborative. I dont know, a textbook as a genre has a particular tone, thats extremely unappealing to me as a writer. I think of myself as a writer. I happen to write history, but i would write anything. But a few years ago i was asked for the first time to write history in the United States, just me, and i said well, like, as a college textbook, and i said well, id be very interested in doing that, but i want i think theres actually a need for history in the United States thats not for students, but thats just for the public as a whole. There used to be these books. There used to be at a certain point in every american historians career this was always men would write the account of the nations past. None of them are the last of their kind. They are to offer up at this moment in time heres how this historian sees this story. That tradition had fallen away and been really quite violently repudiated but it means there hasnt been a book like my history of the United States for quite a long time. It seemed to me like something of a dare. Like i dare you, can you resurrect this lost tradition and just do this . I worked with an editor and a publisher that i really admire, and they let me write the book that i wanted to write that offered the account that i thought needed to be written that reflected my decades of teaching American History and writing essays about American History and books about American History. So yeah, so i said okay, you know, i will do it. For me it was important that i write it quickly. I get really [inaudible] really fast. I did write the book actually pretty quickly, but i also had this idea, and, you know, viewers that have read the book can say if this worked. I thought if i wrote it fast, it would read fast that it would have a kind headlong page turnery momentum to it. I took on the project with the idea that i would spend x number of months on this project and no more and then i would move on. If it had been will you write the history of the United States in a thousand pages and you could spend ten years on that, i never would have done that. That would have driven me nuts. Do you start chronologically when you start a project like that . Yeah, i mean, the book is quite strictly chronological. It is a history. Each chapter makes an argument. It has a theme. Its not an encyclopedia, but it aims to be, you know, significant in its ability to comprehend large swaths of events, so yeah, i had a very particular method. The book has four parts. Each part has four chapters. Theres a lot of symmetry to the organization, and, you know, i made my outline, and then i went to the library and i checked out the 50 books i thought i would need to write the first chapter. I put them in a stack in my office, and i put a yellow sticky on top and said chapter one. Then i walked over and got the 50 books for chapters 3 and 4 and made stacks. Every time i got to the bottom of the stack, i would write that chapter, return those books and go get the stack for the next pile so i would have them all ready at hand. Yeah, just day by day, i worked my way through it, year by year. It was actually really fun to i teach at harvard and the library my office is not too far from the library building, or i else i wouldnt be able to trek the books out all the time. After you check out the books at the desk, you go to the security desk they look at the books to make sure they have been properly checked out and you could leave the building with them. I knew the security guards pretty well because i spend a lot of time coming in and out of the library. They came to know what i was doing, so everybody would be paying attention to oh, you have the new deal. I cant wait till you get to truman. I want to ask you some questions. All the security guards were following my progress, and often would recommend books. You know, people read a lot of history. So it was really it was just a fun they were the people i checked up with most while i was writing. What got left out . Oh, tons got left out. I mean, one of the reasons that it became so difficult and really untenable for an academic historian to write the history of the United States single volume history of the United States is that the revolution and the historical scholarship, the last half century and more, has involved putting back in all the people who were stripped out of the story of the United States for a century and a half, in a tradition of scholars who were just really quite provencial. They all belonged to a single, you know, Demographic Group, and they were interested in the history of that Demographic Group and no other. So it meant that we had you know, we had a very narrow understanding of even what politics is, but beginning in the 60s, women and people of color entered the academy and founded a women Study Programs and black history programs and what became lgbtq or sex and gender studies, history and science, this incredible expansion of the scope of what people and groups and topics were the proper object of American History and subject of american historical books, really changed. All those people who kind of exploded the profession thought well, no one could write given now that we have such a broad understanding of the diversity of the american experience, how could you cram all that into a single volume . It would involve a kind of rhetorical act of violence, an act of exclusion of certain groups. If in any case, you would be kind of beaten up for what you left out, what you emphasized or what you failed to emphasize. Academic scholarship in any field is pretty punishing. Theres a lot of disincentives to do this kind of work, right . There was also the idea that you would be promoting a kind of fiction that the country was just one thing, that could be reduced to one story. You know, these are the years of, you know, not only intellectual ferment and the growth of the academy and increasing diversity within the academy, but a political sensibility around multiculturalism and the storiedness of the american past. So the thing it just seemed like an untenable project and also a thankless project which is why i think it didnt get done for a very long time. So i found that difficult. There were many nights that i lay awake in bed making lists in all the things that belonged in the chapter that i was writing that i knew i wasnt going to be able to attend to, but i wasnt writing an encyclopedia and a reader needs to know why information is in a chapter. It needs to be supportive of some theme or set of claims. You know, you come up with rules for what needs to be there and what doesnt need to be there which is not to say that they cant all be second guessed but i guess the way i eventually got myself to sleep instead of making those lists was to remember this is not the last definitive account of the history of the United States. I was trying to rekindle tradition of attempting to make sense of the nations past, and my hope would be that other people would come along and write similar books, and they would challenge and even subvert challenge my account and even subvert my book, and thats the nature thats how historical scholarship works, so its not really meant to be the end. It is meant to be the beginning so what motivated your followup book this america . Yeah, both of these were books that i was asked to write. I dont think on my own i would have actually pursued either of these projects. So i was asked to write an essay for Foreign Affairs on the history of american nationalism. There was a time in 2018, viewers might remember, trump gave a speech im trying to remember where. Maybe he was in texas. I think he was at a campaign rally, and he said he was explaining he said im a nationalist, and he said Something Like yeah, i guess im not supposed to use that word, but im a nationalist. I may be misremembering the details. Subsequently, in an interview, someone asked him about nationalism and the history of the word and its meaning and its implications. He kind of just said he didnt care, you know, the point was that he considered himself to be a nationalist and he could define the word the way he wanted to define it. And so there was in 2018 a lot of discussion of the rise of a kind of american nationalism, and so i was asked to write some kind of an account of the history of american nationalism, either in the context of nationalist movement or the idea of america as a nation. I wrote an essay that was about that but also about what a National History does and what the absence of National History can do by way of closing a problem to liberalism. Then i was asked to turn that essay into a short book. I think i say in a preface to the book that i wanted to explain what a nation is and why nation states matter and what liberal nationalism is and why it matters and how it is that in the absence of the dissent of liberalism, the only kind of nationalism that comes to the floor is illiberal and that poses a danger. So the book is in defense of liberal nationalism we will get into those definitions in just a minute. We happen to have that video of President Trump in october of 2018 in houston. [inaudible]. A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about our country so much. You know what . We cant have that. You know they have a word that sort of became old fashioned, its called a nationalist, and i say really, were not supposed to use that word. You know what i am . Im a nationalist. Okay . [cheers and applause] nationalist. Use that word. Use that word. So professor jill lepore, when you hear the president say im a nationalist, what does that say to you . I think in the context as a whole, its so interesting to hear that, and i dont have video in this exchange. Im 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 theres something about calling out and celebrating nationalism before an adoring crowd that i think for a lot of people who have watched nationalists rise to power in order to secure the unflinching fidelity of the people for the purpose of acts of aggression, its a very unsettling, if not terrifying thing to bear witness to. Im really struck and 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 antisemitic. In the history of the formation of nation states, jews were often people without a nation; right . The nation state emerges, you know, in the 18th and 19th century, and nationalism, the fidelity to a nation, to a nation state as a core commitment of many people around the world tends to really set to one side people who are stateless. So that includes, you know, the jews, and a lot of conspiracy theorys in the 18th and 19th century are fundamentally antisemitic in the sense they are based on the idea that theres a secret group of jewish people who are bankers, who control all the money, and that these people have no National Attachment have global ties that undermining national borders, and so, you know, when the rhetoric about globalists come back, you know, in our day, it really harkens back to the long tradition of invocation of the International Conspiracy of jewish bankers. So theres something, you know, really interesting about that. Not to say that there are very strenuous and i think important critiques of globalization to be made. I think one of the chief criticisms of liberals, so called progressives is that 1990s, kind of the bill clinton era forward, even into the late 80s, but through obama, is the kind of thinking of varies of globalism, in a sense that certain people will be left behind by globalization, but thats okay, you know, it is for the best. And it does enrich an enormous number of financiers. Theres a rea