I'm Lee Rowland, and from the ACLU, this is At Liberty, the podcast where we discuss today's most pressing civil rights and civil liberties topics.

Today, the historian Jill Lepore on the nature of our democracy.

Our Declaration of Independence confidently asserts that the American ideals of political equality,

God-given rights, and the sovereign people are self-evident.

But 250 years later, debates about what it means to be politically equal, what rights

were born with, and exactly just who is part of we the people, are as fraught as ever.

Historian Jill Lepore recently released a magisterial study of American history called

These Truths, which tells the story of how our nation has evolved from its origins.

Jill is a professor of American history at Harvard, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and a

prolific thinker and writer on history and contemporary politics.

Jill, thank you so much for joining us.

Sure.

Thanks for having me.

As I mentioned, this is a sweeping book on American

history. It would be impossible to discuss all the ideas it covers in one interview. So I'd love

to pull out two threads that I think have dominated American politics since the beginning,

the idea of who gets to be an American, and how we grapple with

representation and voting in a democracy.

Okay.

Let's start with the idea of who gets to be an American.

Americans are fond of saying that we're a nation of immigrants.

Have we always thought of ourselves that way?

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