A vision of America in the age of Trump, from the brilliant mind of Jill Lepore. The past decade has marked a shift in America's trajectory, pivoting around the monumental presidential election of 2016. Acclaimed author and leading historian Jill Lepore has been documenting the twists and turns as they unfold, beginning with the run-up to Trump's election through to the chaos and confusion left in its wake. In this incisive collection of essays published in the New Yorker, Lepore writes with wit and warmth as she reflects on the issues of our from culture wars and the corrosion of the media to disruptive innovation and the future of technology, from the constitutional crisis surrounding gun rights to the racial history behind the language of insurrection. Balancing a penetrating personal lens with indispensable history, she makes sense of public life during an era of aberration and extremity that has left our political landscape forever changed. Rooted in the everyday lives of its citizens, The American Beast offers an arresting portrait of America over the span of a decade, capturing the tumultuous relationship between the country's violent past and fractured present.
Author
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, Harvard College Professor, and chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best non-fiction book on race, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, and the Berkshire Prize and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award. A co-founder of the magazine Common-place, Lepore’s essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Journal of American History and American Quarterly. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Charles Warren Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She has served as a consultant for the National Park Service and currently serves on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery and the Society of American Historians. Jill lives in Cambridge,Massachusetts.
