Jill Lepore is a Harvard professor, a prolific and award-winning historian, and a writer for The New Yorker. Given the many roles she plays, reviewing her new book, These Truths: A History of the United States, for an academic journal may be a fool’s errand. She is not writing for academics. Although These Truths documents how gender and race have distorted the universal claims of American democracy, a central theme of a generation of historians, Lepore embeds her analysis in an old-fashioned political narrative that begins in 1492 and stretches down to Donald Trump. This will probably appeal to the political class and journalists and just as probably dismay those historians who are not presidential biographers. The division will be over what counts as a history of the United States. Any author operating on the scale of These Truths is going to produce a selective American history. Lepore artfully distinguishes between American history and the story of American history. American history contains far more than the story she tells, but that is the point of telling a story. Historians make stories by excluding. We prune away the wild and exuberant growth of the past until a form emerges. Lepore takes the vast branchings of the American past and cuts them down to a political trunk and a few stout ideological limbs. In crafting her America, Lepore lops off entire regions and important topics or reduces them to nubbins. Most readers see only the finished form, but other historians recognize what has been cut away. Mere lists of what she omits do not add up to valid criticisms of what she has written. They are only demands that she write a different book. A history only faces a telling critique when something essential to the themes that an author has chosen is eliminated. Evidence counts as essential when restoring it discredits the story that the author tells. A Turnerian account of the settlement of an empty continent, for example, crumbles when Indians appear. Lepore bets that a set of foundational political ideas and the government and politics they produce are adequate to convey the contours of American

中文翻译：

---

纽约人民族

Jill Lepore 是哈佛大学教授、多产且屡获殊荣的历史学家，也是《纽约客》的作家。鉴于她扮演的许多角色，回顾她的新书《这些真相：美国历史》，对于学术期刊来说可能是一件傻事。她不是为学者写作。尽管这些真相记录了性别和种族如何扭曲了美国民主的普遍主张，这是一代历史学家的中心主题，但 Lepore 将她的分析嵌入了一种老式的政治叙事，该叙事始于 1492 年，一直延伸到唐纳德特朗普。这可能会吸引政治阶层和记者，也可能会让那些不是总统传记作者的历史学家感到沮丧。分裂将结束什么算作美国的历史。任何以这些真理为尺度运作的作者都将创作一部有选择性的美国历史。Lepore 巧妙地区分了美国历史和美国历史的故事。美国历史包含的远不止她讲的故事，但这就是讲故事的重点。历史学家通过排除来创造故事。我们修剪过去的狂野而旺盛的成长，直到出现一种形式。Lepore 将美国历史的广大分支切分为政治主干和一些坚固的意识形态分支。在塑造她的美国时，Lepore 将整个地区和重要主题砍掉，或者将它们简化为小块。大多数读者只看到完成的形式，但其他历史学家认识到被删减的内容。仅仅列出她遗漏的内容并不能构成对她所写内容的有效批评。他们只是要求她写一本不同的书。只有当作者选择的主题必不可少的东西被消除时，历史才会面临有说服力的批评。当恢复它使作者讲述的故事不可信时，证据是必不可少的。例如，当印第安人出现时，特纳关于一片空旷大陆定居点的描述就崩溃了。Lepore 认为，一套基本的政治思想及其产生的政府和政治足以传达美国的轮廓。