Ever since laboring through two semesters of American history in college a million years ago, I have been looking for a one volume history of The United States that has the narrative propulsion of great novels. I wanted a story stripped down to essentials of the ebbs and flows in the struggle to realize the essential truths embodied in the constitution that every person is born with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that every person is equal to every other. At last, I found it.

In These Truths, Lepore reminds us that the very first words in the Preamble are: We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union. The fact that the phrase more perfect is a contradiction in terms says it all. Lepore is very good at telling the story of our taking one step forward, matched by a slightly smaller step backward in a cadence that unlike novels, keeps on going toward what is, on this side of heaven, an unobtainable goal.

Her story telling begins long before the American Revolution, (which, she points out, was contemporaneous with many other revolutions: one in Haiti which was successful, and many others on American slave labor camps, which were not) but it heats way up, at least for me, when it gets to the writing of that preamble and what follows it. She reminds us that 25 of the 55 men who attended the constitutional convention in the hot summer of 1787 owned slaves. Was Abraham Lincoln thinking of those 25 men, almost a century later, when he wrote to a friend that, Those who deny freedom to others do not deserve it themselves? Am I being cynical or realistic when I wonder if the real reason George Washington abstained from continuing in the presidency was that he wanted to get back to his cushy life in his riverside mansion where enslaved people made his living for him?

I grew up in a northern community where no home owner would even consider selling their house to a Black family. Now to refuse on racial grounds is against the law. My Father was 18 years old before his own mother was allowed to vote. Now, according to The League of Women Voters, the outcome of next presidential election will depend on women. These Truths captures the sweep of these and so many other steps forward, each creating its own own backlash, in a mere 780 pages that end with the first Trump presidency.

That millions of voters chose a felon, who was also convicted of trying very hard to rape a woman in a department store, who incited an insurrection and continues to claim that he won the 2020 election, and insists that Haitians in Oxford, Ohio eat their neighbors’ golden retrievers, who calls American citizens from Somali, garbage, sends armed masked employees of his government to terrorize citizens in the guise of controlling illegal immigration, threatens to usurp Greenland, which he thinks is Iceland, and make Canada our 51st state, while having sex with porn stars in his spare time, and is probably a pedophile, isn’t a step backward, then what is?

But have faith: someone will write the sequel which narrates the next step forward away from Trumpism. In the meantime, remember: good and truthful story telling is always a bright light in a dark time.

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