The Story of America : : Essays on Origins

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Call Number: 973 Le
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	973 Le	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories -- from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address -- to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print.

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Readable History! submitted by sdunav on June 16, 2014, 1:22pm This is an interesting collection of articles on American history. I didn't find it as compulsively readable as Lepore's biography of Ben Franklin's sister Jane ("Book of Ages"), but it is very well written and amazingly well-researched. Topics vary from colonial Jamestown (John Smith, liar or gentlemanly exaggerator?), Pilgrims, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the Constitution (and Tea Party's current use of it), Andrew Jackson (boo! worst president ever), Longfellow, Noah Webster, the history of credit, bankruptcy, and debtor's prisons, Edgar Allen Poe, Charlie Chan, presidential inaugural addresses, and the Great Migration.

Most of these essays were already published in The New Yorker. But if you have even a smidgeon of interest in American history, it's worth checking this book out of the library and reading whatever ones strike your fancy. Not so much good for plugging through the whole thing at once