This America by Jill Lepore

This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore --- 150 pages including Acknowledgments and Selected Bibliography.

Adapted from Google Books:

From Harvard scholar and New York Times bestselling author Jill Lepore, comes a bold essay on the origins of the American nation, and its survival in the twenty-first century.

With toxic forms of nationalism on the rise, at a time of despair over the future of liberal democracy, Lepore makes a stirring case for the Nation and repudiates nationalism by explaining its disruptive and divisive history.

In part a primer on the 19th century origin of the concept of the nation, This America explains how much of America's history has been a battle between liberal democracy and illiberal manifestations of nationalism,  up to and including the nation's current bitter struggles over immigration.

Defending liberalism, This America  makes the case for the nation held together not by blood or race or religion, but by allegiance to inclusive ideals and laws. Lepore argues that American historians largely abandoned that allegiance 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 abandoned the study of the nation, nationalism didn't die. But in the vacuum thus created, the ugly forces of prejudice, intolerance and injustice came back again to undermine that allegiance.  .

A call to re-engage with and expand our understanding of American principles and ideals and to re-engage with our collective national narrative, not to accuse or blame, but to acknowledge and make whole once more.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from the New York Times.

Click HERE to read the review from National Public Radio.