These truths historian jill6/9/2023 ![]() ![]() That story, she writes, essentially is the working out of a question that the founders raised in the 1700s and every generation since has struggled to answer: Can a people rule themselves “by reflection and election, by reason and truth, rather than by accident and violence, by prejudice and deceit?” Lepore, a Harvard University history professor known for her lucid New Yorker essays on American life and culture, dives into the cross-grained American epic starting with Christopher Columbus in 1492 and ending with Donald Trump in 2016. ![]() ![]() history in “These Truths,” a title taken from a Jeffersonian clause in that same declaration. That absurd calculation - by the same man who justified his nation’s independence on the basis that “all men are created equal” - is one of many ironies Jill Lepore notes on her absorbing journey through U.S. Jefferson was trying to figure out how many generations it would take - and whether his children with Sally Hemings, his mixed-race slave, would make the cut. ![]() Under Virginia law, a person with a black ancestor had to have at least seven-eighths white ancestry to count as a fully legal citizen. In the late winter of 1815, Thomas Jefferson sat down in his study at Monticello to work out a math problem. ![]()
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