This America: The Case for the Nation

(Paperback)

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'Jill Lepore is that rare combination in modern life of intellect, originality and style' Amanda Foreman

'A thoughtful and passionate defence of her vision of American patriotism' New York Times

From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling historian, Jill Lepore, comes a bold new history of nationalism, and a plan for hope in the twenty-first century.

With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise, at a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation - and repudiates nationalism by explaining its long history.

In part a primer on the origins of nations, The Case for the Nation explains how much of American history has been a battle between nationalism, liberal and illiberal, all the way down to the nation's latest, bitter struggles over immigration.

Defending liberalism, as The Case for the Nation 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, nationalism doesn't die. Instead, it eats liberalism. But liberalism is still in there, and The Case for the Nation is an attempt to pull it out.

A manifesto for a better world, and a call for a new engagement with national narratives, The Case for the Nation reclaims the future by acknowledging the past.

Reviews

Praise for Jill Lepore - -

This vivid history brings alive the contradictions and hypocrisies of the land of the free - The Times

A history for the 21st century, far more inclusive than the standard histories of the past - Guardian

Monumental ... a crucial work for presenting a fresh and clear-sighted narrative of the entire story ... exciting and page-turningly fascinating, in one of those rare history books that can be read with pleasure for its sheer narrative energy - New Statesman

Jill Lepore is that rare combination in modern life of intellect, originality and style - TLS

It isn't until you start reading it that you realise how much we need a book like this one at this particular moment. A big sweeping book, a way for us to take stock at this point in the journey, to look back, to remind us who we are and to point to where we're headed - New York Times

This sweeping, sobering account of the American past is a story not of relentless progress but of conflict and contradiction, with crosscurrents of reason and faith, black and white, immigrant and native, industry and agriculture rippling through a narrative that is far from completion - The New York Times Book Review

Praise for Jill Lepore:

This vivid history brings alive the contradictions and hypocrisies of the land of the free - The Times

Author Bio

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, where she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, the humanities, and American political history. She is the author of The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (winner of the Bancroft Prize), New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), The Secret History of Wonder Woman (winner of the American History Book Prize), If Then (longlisted for the National Book Award) and many other titles. She is a staff writer at the New Yorker, host of the podcast The Last Archive, and was the winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in 2021.