You today by your television profess provideer. And now on book tv we are live with author and Harvard University history professor jill lepore who over the next 2 hours will be taking your calls and comments. Professors book include secret history of wonder woman, these truths, history of the United States and the newly published if then, about the cold war origins of data mining and social manipulation. Harvard professor jill lapore, before we get into the substance of your book, as a historian, what is your contemporary view of how our world is going to be viewed . [laughter] guest i think we have so little perspective on this moment that it is quite impossible to say. I think the perception that many people in the United States and, of course, also around the world have that this is an extraordinary uni shall time is something that we are in a time out of time will be a curiosity in the future. People will look back and wonder about that very sense alienation. I think that would be studied. Host when you think about it today, do you compare it to any moment in history . Guest no. As a historian im interested in the knowledge. I think we we have a cognitive tendency to enjoy analogies, to find one thing to be like another all of the time just in the same way im the kind of person that sees likens in family members, that looks like great grandma and i recognize that a lot of that is is, you know, my misperception, my need for familiarity. I think that there has been for most of my career as historian, the question that they is what time is it like, i understand where it comes from. Its an easy story to write. This reminds me of fdr. A whole prop of president ial biographers who go out on talk shows and offer up those analogies. I generally find them to be not especially useful and i certainly think in this era its actually a way to contain the chaos that isnt helpful because its a way to avoid confronting what is truly strange about the moment in time. Host two years ago when a talk you gave about the book, these truths, what do we mean when we talk about American History, how are we to reckon with the fact that our present day is so polarized that we believe that the past is two different paths, we cant even imagine sharing common ancestry as people and that seems to me as perilous state of affairs. Guest i still standby that statement. If anything, the past doesnt change but the perception is more and more divided and more bipartisan passion, real passion. Thats been obvious to me as a historian for a long time. Maybe recent conversation about monuments, whether confederate monuments should stand. Those points have been going on for a very long time but they havent occupied the attention of the media and of broad swath of the public, just the last year. We can think about other controversies in the past, you know, the history wars of 1990s or moments in 1910s and 20s over public fight over history of history of a particular era. Im sorry, go ahead. Host no, go ahead, finish. Guest i think that we have a kind of daily sense now that, you know, remember the crazy, goofy internet meme about the blue dress and some people saw it as blue and some people saw it as gold. I never looked at it. Thats the world that we live now. Every piece of information that is available can be seen. Blue dress or gold dress. Thats a fractured lens that is now the spectacles and becomes really deeply fascinated by things that happened in old times and im interested in how it got here and how people struggled in the past and what we can learn from frankly on from face of suffering which is really most of the story of humanity. I think its really distressing that people looked in the past simply as like folder that you can open up and find position papers. Host i was close with this, i think its pertinent now in these truths, you write that the american experiment has not ended, a nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. Guest yeah. In the course of this conversation you are likely to throw something at me that i changed my mind. I change my mind all of the time. Thats just the truth. A nation is human creation, bees live in hives, cows live in herds, those are national communities. Humans dont naturally live in nations. Its a things that humans have invented as category that in our era has been proven external because the liberal nation state is the only Human Institution that can guaranty rights to people and the United States is a particular place in the history of the rise of the liberal nation state and organization of a government through the consent of the people that can actually deliver to the people goods and services and the guaranty of rights. And so nations are really, really important and to say they are doesnt mean that theres something trivial. Nation is fundamentally unstable thing. In some ways, especially the United States which is a nation based on idea and not on the shared heritage and really not on a shared history or not shared language or shared religion, based on an idea. People dont believe on the idea and the nation will cease to exist. The daily anguish of people wondering whats going to happen in the United States. Looking from the country of abroad, do people not believe in the idea anymore. Thats the perilous state of that chaos. Host professor jill lapore, at what point did you say to yourself, yeah, i think i want to write a history of the United States in 800some page . Guest ive been asked to write like u. S. History textbooks throughout my career, you know, viewers may know that most college and High School Textbooks are jointlyily by jointly by team of scholars. Twentieth century, 19 century political historian and takes a group of scholars to cover the whole story of the United States. Ive never been attract today that as a project. I like to work prerogatively but the textbook as genre has a particular tone that is extremely unappeal to go me as a writer. I would write anything. A few years ago i was asked to write history of the United States. [laughter] guest i think theres actually a need for history of the United States, not for students but thats just for the public as a whole. There used to be these books, at a certain point in american historians career he this was always men would write the nations past as Public Service and, you know, none of them are the last of their kind. They are meant to offer up in this moment in time this is how this historian sees this story and that tradition had fallen away and then really quite repudiated and hasnt been a book like my history of the United States for quite a long time. I thought it seemed to me Something Like a dare. I dare for la tradition and just do this. I worked with another publisher that i hugely admired and they let me write the book that offered the account that i thought needed to be written that reflected my decades of teaching American History and writing essays about American History and books about American History. So, yeah, so i said, okay, i will do it. My for me it was important that i write it quickly. I get bored with books pretty fast. I had this idea and, you know, viewers who have read the book can respond. The idea that if i wrote it fast it would read fast like headlong momentum to it. So i took on the project with very much the idea that i would spend x number of months on the project and no more and id move on. I think if it had been where you write history of the United States in a thousands of pages, you could spend 10 years on that. Ive never have done that. That would have taken me host do you start chronologically when you start a project like that . Guest yeah, i made an outline. The book is chronological. Its not a chronical. It is history. It makes the argument each chapter makes the argument, it has themes and its not encyclopedia that aims to be, you know, significant in its ability for large swaths of events. I had very particular method, each part has 4 chapters, a lot of symmetry to the organization and, you know, i made outline and i went to the library and i checked out the 50 that i would need to write the first chapter and put them in a stack in my office and put sticky and did chapter 1 and i made stacks and every time i got to the bottom of a stack i would write that chapter, return those books and then go get the next pile so id have them all ready to hand. Yeah,i just, you know, day by day worked my way through it year by year. It was actually really fun to i teach at harvard and my office is not too far from the Library Building or else i would be able to get books at a time. They look at your books to make sure that theyve been properly checked out and i know the security guards pretty because i spend a lot of time coming out from the library and they came to know what i was doing so everybody would be paying attention to. Youre at the new deal. I cant wait till you get to truman. All of the security guards were hollowing my progress. I recommend books. People read a lot of history. There was people that i checked up with most while i was writing. Host what got left out . Guest tons got left out. It became difficult for historian to write history of the United States, the history of the United States is that the revolution and historical scholarship in the last century or more has involved putting back in all of the people who were stripped out of the story of the United States for a century and a half in tradition of scholars who just really quite they all belong to a single, you know, Demographic Group and they were interested in the history of the Demographic Group and no other, so it meant that we had you know, we had a very narrow understanding of either what politics is, beginning in the 1960s women and and people of color entered the academy and found that women still used programs and black history programs and what became lgbtq and sex and gender studies, historians of science, this incredible expansion of the scope of what people and groups and topics were the proper object of American History and subject of american Historical Books really changed. All those people who kind of exploded the profession thought, well, no one could write it. Given now that we have such a broad understanding of the diversity of the american experience, how could you cram all of that into a single volume. It would involve a rhetorical act of violence and exclusion of certain groups. In any case, youd be kind of beaten up for what you left out or emphasized, what you failed to emphasize and, you know, kind of Academy Scholarship in any field is pretty punishing. Theres a lot of disincentives to do this kind of work. Theres also the idea that you would be promoting a kind of fiction that the country was just one thing and could be reduced to one story. These are the years of not only intellectual formant. But kind of a political sensibility around multiculturalism and stories of the american past. The thing just seemed like an unattainable project which is why it did not get done for a really long time. So i i found that difficult. I mean, i there were many nights i lay awake in bed making lists of all the things that belonged in the chapter that i was writing that i knew i was going to be able to attend to. But i wasnt writing an ebbing encyclopedia and a reader needs to know why the information is in the chapter and has to be in support of some theme or sort of claims and, you know, you come up with rules for what needs to be there and what doesnt need to be there which is not to say that they cant all be second guessed. I guess the way that i eventually got myself to sleep instead of making those lists was the number, this is not the last definitive account. I was trying to rekindle the tradition of attempting to make sense to have nations past and my hope would be that other people would come along and write similar books and they would challenge and even challenge my account and even subvert my book and thats the nature thats historical scholarship works. So its not really meant to be the end. Its meant to be the beginning. Host so what motivated your followup book, this america . Guest well, both of those were books that i was asked to write. I dont think on my own i would pursue the projects. I was asked to write an essay for Foreign Affairs on the history of american nationalism. There was a time in 2018, viewers might remember, trump gave a speech maybe he was in texas. I think he was at a Campaign Rally and he said, he was explaining, he said im a nationalist. I guess im not supposed to use that word but im a nationalist and i think i may be misremembering the details. Subsequently in an interview someone asked him about nationalism and history of the word and its meaning and implications and he just said he didnt care, the point is that he considered himself to be a nationalist and he could defined the world the way he wanted to define it. So there was in 2018 a lot of discussion of rise of american nationalism. And so i was asked to write some kind of account of american nationalism either in the context of National Movements or the idea the idea of america as a nation and so i wrote i wrote an essay that was about that but also what National History does and what the absence of National Histories can do by way of posing a problem to liberalism and then i was asked to turn that essay into a short book. So i did i think i say in preface to the book, i wanted to explain what a nation is and why nation states matter and what liberal nationalism is and why it matters and how it is that in the absence of the defense of liberalism, the kind of nationalism that comes to the floor is iliberal. And we will get into the definitions in just a minute but we have the video of trump in 2016. A globalist is a person that wants the felony the globe to the well not caring about the country much. We cant have that, they have a word, it sort of became old fashion, its called a nationalist and i say really, we are not supposed to use that word, you know what i am, im a nationalist, okay. Im a nationalist. [cheers and applause] nationalist. Use that word. Use that word. Host professor jill lapore when you hear the president say that im a nationalist, what does that say to you . Guest its interesting to hear that and i and i dont have video in this exchange. Im not looking at what the viewers are looking at and i think the video is probably significantly richer in terms of the spirit of the occasion because theres something about calling out and celebrating nationalism before an adoring crowd that i think for a lot of people who have watched nationalists rise to power in order to secure the stability of the people for the purpose of acts of aggression, its a very unsettling if not terrifying thing to bear witness to. Im really stricken in and i had forgotten how he begins by defining a globist which is really interesting because the rhetoric about globalism and globalist in particularly is fundamental antisemitic. Jews were often people without a nation, like, the nation state in 18th and 19th century and nationalism, fidelity to a nation, to a nation state as a core commitment of many people around the world tends to really set to one side people who are stateless so that includes the jews, and a lot of conspiracy theories that date to 18th and 19th century are fundamental antisemitic based on the idea that theres a secret cabal of jewish people who are bankers who control all of the money and that these people who have no National Attachments have global ties that undermine National Borders and so, you know, when the rhetoric about globalists comes back, you know, in our day it really the long tradition of the vocation and its not to say that there are very strenuous and i think important critics of globalization to be made. One of the criticisms of liberal, socalled progressives of the 1990s, bill clinton era forward and even into late 1980s but through obama is unthinking of globalism and in the sense that certain people will be left behind by globalization, but thats okay. Its for the best. And it does enrich enormous number of financiers and people who recognize trump and are thinking about all the ways in which globalization has really been responsible for a great deal of the income inequality around the world. Its an interesting mix of like, yeah, there are people who are really angry about what was going on, beginning in the 90s with the fantasy of globalization but for trump to invoke nationalism in the way that he does and very much to applaud what he is, you know, absolutely presenting as an iliberal nationalism is kind of the classic work of liberal nationalist. One of the most important things of people who do make the move, kind of define globalist which has antisemitic history as demonic, bad people, bad people, people who love the nation, this nation best are the good people and their love is simply another form of patriotism. So the essential step in in people willing to make sacrifices in the nation that can only be asked in the interest of an authoritarian. Theres a whole theres a messy history behind that. One to have things that i try to do by writing this short book, just pause. What is the difference between patriotism and nationalism, when people say nationalism now, they generally only ever mean liberal nationalism, liberals wont defend nationalism any longer. And i will, i think its important to love your country. I think its important to be willing to to, in fact, be willing to think about your obligations to your country, and the civic duty that we owe to one another, like thats the thing that i believe that is central to the project of any liberal nation state and i think its