On Thursday, May 28, over thirty students and staff alike logged onto Zoom for the third installment of the virtual MX series, a Q&A session with historian and author Jill Lepore. For 30 minutes, she discussed the process of writing bestseller “These Truths: A History of the United States”, the role of history in political polarization, and the significance of the 2016 presidential election. 

Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, is no stranger to the academic spotlight. When she isn’t teaching, she works as a staff writer for “The New Yorker” and produces “The Last Archive,” a new podcast about “the history of truth, and the historical context for our current fake news, post-truth moment,” according to its Spotify description. Lepore has received numerous awards for her work, including the Bancroft Prize and the American History Book Prize.

“There are a lot of historians who like to read the works of other historians and engage in historiographical debate,” Lepore said in the ZooMX. “What I love about being a historian is finding out about people’s lives. A lot of what historians do is read other people’s old mail, and I love to do that.”

History teacher Jeanne Barr appreciated the opportunity to hear Lepore talk. “She would  hear the question, think for about 10 nanoseconds and then rattle off a full, complete, complex, answer,” Barr said. “I just am always in awe of people who have that kind of command of their field. I loved her answer about the importance of connecting with the people that you’re communicating with.”

In response to Barr’s question about the role of visual evidence in teaching history, Lepore stressed images’ centrality to her lectures. “The idea is that it enlists your audience in the work of inquiry with you,” Lepore said. “I ask the audience questions about an image so that we can all discover, together, what we’re looking at and what it means. That is the thrill and joy of being a researcher.” 

Lepore also spoke on the importance of curiosity and storytelling in her work. “There’s history everywhere,” she said. “There’s history in your kitchen cupboard, there’s history in your apartment building. The wealth of history is about the ingenuity of the researcher, virtuosity of the storyteller.” 

Eighth grade history teacher Stephanie Nishimoto-Lorenzo invited Lepore, via email, to speak at the “ZooMX.” Since the quarantine began, Nishimoto-Lorenzo has been leading a book club, composed of five eighth grade students, that recently finished reading “These Truths,” published in 2018. Lepore also talked to the book club, separately from the MX. 

“It had a really broad scope and was able to look at a lot of themes coming from 1492, the beginning of the colonization of the Americas all the way up to Trump’s election,” eighth grader Grant Koh said on “These Truths.” “Lepore was able to show a bunch of the main political flash points and how those were resolved. And I thought it was just a really good, broad overview of U.S. history.” 

In her talk, Lepore mentioned the need for a more nuanced understanding of U.S. history, a sentiment Koh recognized in “These Truths.” “It’s a different way of telling U.S. history,” Koh continued. “If you look at Zinn, that’s very much focused on oppressed groups and how the United States has done various bad things. And more traditional histories are kind of more narrow in scope and about all the great things that the U.S. has done. This is somewhere in between those two.” 

The Upper School history curriculum also includes Lepore’s written work. U.S. History classes read chapters from “These Truths,” and students in Barr’s “Talk of the Town” elective discuss her articles published in “The New Yorker.” What differentiates “These Truths” from traditional textbooks, besides its narrative style, is its timely relevance — the book, published in 2018, discusses the 2016 election and the current state of our democracy.

“The election happened in 2016 and Donald Trump won and I thought, ‘I’m going to have to change the ending of ‘These Truths,’” Lepore said in the MX, “because it would be a betrayal of that incredibly important political realignment to not at least write up to the point of the election.”

“Lepore writes a lot about the question, ‘is democracy under threat?’” Barr said. “We just read chapter 16 of ‘These Truths’ and discussed this theme in my U.S. History class — it’s pretty bleak. I read her work and I take it as fuel. That’s the effect a great story has: it makes you want to get involved in the story and shape the future.”