Jill Lepore on America’s two revolutions

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, News Commentary, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2019

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jill Lepore is a Harvard historian, a New Yorker contributor, and the author of These Truths, a dazzling one-volume synthesis of American history. She’s the kind of history teacher everyone wishes they’d had, able to effortlessly connect the events and themes of American history to make sense of our past and clarify our present. “The American Revolution did not begin in 1775 and it didn’t end when the war was over,” Lepore writes. This is a conversation about those revolutions. But more than that, it’s a conversation about who we are as a country, and how that self-definition is always contested and constantly in flux. And beyond all that, Lepore is just damn fun to talk to. Every answer she gives has something worth chewing over for weeks. You’ll enjoy this one. Recommended books: Fear Itself by Ira Katznelson A Godly Hero by Michael Kazin The Warmth of Other Sons by Isabel Wilkerson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	When you drive a Chevy electric vehicle, you're getting more than a way to get from point A to point B.
0:06.0	You're saying goodbye to gas stations and how low to open roads.
0:09.0	With the growing network of public charging stations, you'll be able to charge your EV while you shop, work, or do whatever you want to be doing with your time.
0:17.0	Chevy is making EVs for everyone, everywhere.
0:20.0	Go to chevrelay.com slash electric to learn more.
0:24.0	It's late. You're almost home after catching that concert you and your friend's snag tickets to you with MX months ago.
0:35.0	You're all speechless from the last hour spent singing your hearts out.
0:38.0	And the only thing playing in the car is the last song of the night on a full blast in your head.
0:44.0	Admit it. You want it stuck there. The live version, you can't get anywhere else.
0:49.0	Looks like you're getting goosebumps all over again.
0:52.0	When the nights are hit, that's when you're with MX. American Express. Don't live life without it.
0:58.0	So historians always get asked this question. I mean, maybe especially the last 10 years or so, like, has it ever been this bad?
1:04.0	And for a long time, my stock answer to that was, Fuhu.
1:09.0	Like, how can you even ask that question? Like, look at the cost of the country. Has it ever been this bad?
1:15.0	For most people living in the United States and their ancestors, it's been a whole lot worse.
1:22.0	Hello, welcome to the Vox Media Podcast Network.
1:34.0	I've been thinking a lot lately about story and about which stories we tell and what we learn from them.
1:41.0	I think I mentioned in an outro a couple of weeks ago that I listened to the Hanna Gadsby show in a net,
1:48.0	which I found really remarkable, but that that line she keeps saying that you learn from the part of the story you focus on.
1:55.0	A lot of American politics and even culture right now seems to me to be a fight over the part of the story we focus on, the part of the story we tell.
2:04.0	Is it a story of progress? Is it a story of struggle? Is it a story of fairness, of unfairness, of enough having been done or not enough having been done?
2:13.0	And it's important, not just politically, but it's important because it's what we learn from.
	...

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