In a nation devoted to freedom, why were some free and others not? Like so many Americans, Lepore asks that question and another: “By what right are we ruled?” But his will, published throughout the country, delayed emancipation of his slaves until after the death of his wife. When George Washington died in 1799, Lepore writes, “the black people in that room outnumbered the white people”. The question nearly sundered the colonies from all government.

From 1619, “liberty and slavery became the American Abel and Cain”. It is also, very largely and appropriately, a history of race in America, of the attempts of many to realize “these truths” and the heartbreaking struggles of those who have been oppressed. This is, therefore, a history of political equality which necessarily becomes primarily a political history.

Moreover, she notes that though the United States was “founded on a set of ideas … Americans have become so divided that they no longer agree, if they ever did, about what those ideas are, or were”. The “constitution cannot be made easy”, she writes, because “it was never meant to be easy”. This is a history of political equality which necessarily becomes primarily a political history In America’s other founding document, the declaration of independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Can this be true, for everyone of whatever race and for women too? Is it possible for the US – or any nation – to be ruled by reason and choice? For Lepore, these are the essential questions. But her true purpose is much broader: as she writes, the constitution adopted in 1787 was meant to determine whether government could rule “not by accident and force but by reason and choice”. Harvard professor Jill Lepore chooses to begin her history of the United States with that quotation, and much of the worst of America, from lynching to brutality to Native Americans, is rightly here.

Jill lepore these truths