This America: The Case for the Nation
In this short essay, an expansion of a Foreign Affairs piece, Jill Lepore makes a direct case to her fellow liberals. The nation, she argues, is too important an idea to leave to nationalists. American historians spent the late twentieth century retreating from national history toward global and identity-based frames, and that retreat left a vacuum that ethnonationalists rushed to fill. Lepore traces the difference between a generous civic nationalism, rooted in shared political ideals, and the blood-and-soil version now ascendant on the right. She is a Harvard historian and a New Yorker staff writer, and the prose is brisk, learned, and quotable. At under two hundred pages, the book is designed to provoke conversation. Whether you agree with her prescription or not, the argument is sharply made and worth engaging.
What you might want to know about This America: The Case for the Nation
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Historian Jill Lepore argues that liberals abandoned the idea of the nation and need to reclaim it from the right.
This America: The Case for the Nation was written by Jill Lepore, published in 2019 by Liveright Publishing Corporation.
This America: The Case for the Nation is 160 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, This America: The Case for the Nation takes most readers 2 to 3 hours to finish.
This America: The Case for the Nation is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
