The Uses of American History: An Interview with Jill Lepore
- The Uses of American History:An Interview with Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 professor of American History at Harvard University. Her books on American history and culture include The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize; Encounters in the New World: A History in Documents (Oxford University Press, 1999); A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (Knopf, 2002); New York Burning: Liberty and Slavery in an Eighteenth-Century City (Knopf, 2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Blindspot, a novel written jointly with Jane Kamensky (Spiegel & Grau/Random House, 2008).
In 2010 Princeton University Press published Lepore's The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History. In late 2010 Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens spoke with Lepore about the uses of history, the politicization of the past, and writing for the general public.
What prompted your most recent book The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History?
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The Boston Tea Party, 1773. From Matthias Christian Sprengel, Allgemeines historisches Taschenbuch . . . (Berlin, 1783). General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
After a year of watching the Tea Party emerge, I decided I wanted to find out more, so I spent some time interviewing Tea Partiers in Boston, and I spent a lot of time reading Tea Party manifestos. The Tea Party's American Revolution is different from the American Revolution I study and teach. In many ways, the Tea Party's Revolution is irreconcilable with academic historians' Revolution. That makes sense, of course, because what most people carry around in their heads about the American Revolution is what they learned in 4th grade. Why should people in the Tea Party know more about the Revolution? It's not something that people generally study, and that's fine. I didn't think that was worth writing about. What surprised me was how convinced people in the Tea Party were that academic history is a conspiracy of the Left. And, the more I looked at it, the clearer it became that the real difference was in how people in the Tea Party thought about the relationship between the past and the present: unlike historians, they collapsed the distance between the two. Now is just like then. This way of thinking has a great deal in common with both originalism and heritage tourism. At base, though, it is a variety of fundamentalism. What would Jesus do? What would the Founders do? That, I felt, was important to write about.
Does this occur on the Left as well as the Right?
Sure, but it's different, too. In the book I examine the bicentennial during which activists from the Left used the Revolution to make all sorts of political arguments. Martin Luther King wrote about the Boston Tea Party in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. John Kerry marched Paul Revere's Ride in reverse to protest the Vietnam War. There was a left-wing Tea Party in the 1970s, too, part of something called the Peoples Bicentennial Commission, but it was hucksterism, not fundamentalism.
Why do you think it is important for students to take history classes?
History teaches you how to weigh evidence. It teaches you how to analyze data. It teaches you how to argue. It teaches you how to tell stories. The versatility of studying history has to do with the way it straddles the humanities and the social sciences. History teaches us where things come from. A kid might ask, "Why did I come to college?" You can answer that question autobiographically, but it's more interesting to answer it historically. Not, "Why me, why here?" but "Why this, why now?"
What is it like writing about history for the New Yorker?
Mostly, I feel lucky to have the chance to do it. Blessed. I love, mainly, the writing, but I also love the puzzle solving. How can I...
