At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy,
Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America, a
follow-up to her much-celebrated history of the United States,
These Truths. With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise,
Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, repudiates
nationalism here by explaining its long history-and the history of
the idea of the nation itself-while calling for a "new
Americanism": a generous patriotism that requires an honest
reckoning with America's past. Lepore begins her argument with a
primer on the origins of nations, explaining how liberalism, the
nation-state, and liberal nationalism, developed together.
Illiberal nationalism, however, emerged in the United States after
the Civil War-resulting in the failure of Reconstruction, the rise
of Jim Crow, and the restriction of immigration. Much of American
history, Lepore argues, has been a battle between these two forms
of nationalism, liberal and illiberal, all the way down to the
nation's latest, bitter struggles over immigration. Defending
liberalism, as This America demonstrates, requires making the case
for the nation. But American historians largely abandoned that
defense in the 1960s when they stopped writing national history. By
the 1980s they'd stopped studying the nation-state altogether and
embraced globalism instead. "When serious historians abandon the
study of the nation," Lepore tellingly writes, "nationalism doesn't
die. Instead, it eats liberalism." But liberalism is still in
there, Lepore affirms, and This America is an attempt to pull it
out. "In a world made up of nations, there is no more powerful way
to fight the forces of prejudice, intolerance, and injustice than
by a dedication to equality, citizenship, and equal rights, as
guaranteed by a nation of laws." A manifesto for a better nation,
and a call for a "new Americanism," This America reclaims the
nation's future by reclaiming its past.
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