Question
Directions: Watch Jill Lepore discuss her book, The Story of America: Essays on Origins. Then read and examine the excerpt of the introduction to the book below. As you read, record your notes and questions in the space below.
Your notes should focus on key ideas and defining terms you do not know.
Your questions may be used in the in-class discussion. As such, you must prepare at least three, and you must ensure they are high-quality and high-impact. A high-quality and high-impact question:
must not be a yes or no question;
should be open to debate;
should be challenging to answer, without an obvious likely response; and
should be specifically addressing a major issue of importance from the reading.
Source: Jill Lepore, The Story of America: Essays on Origins, 2012.
In 1938, if you had a dollar and seventy-two cents, you could buy a copy of The Rise of American Democracy, a seven hundred-page hardcover about the size of a biggish Bible or a Boy Scout Handbook. While a Bible's worth is hard to measure, the scout guide, at fifty cents, was an awfully good bargain and an excellent book to have on hand if you were shipwrecked on a desert island, not least because it included a chapter on How to Make Fire without Matches. But The Rise of American Democracy promised, invaluably, "to make clear how Americans have come to live and to believe as they do." It is also a very good read. "A Simple Book," its ad copy boasted. "Paragraphs average three to a page.
Sentences are short." Better yet: "A Democracy Theme runs through the whole text."
The Rise of American Democracy was written by Mabel B. Casner, a Connecticut schoolteacher, and Ralph Henry Ga- briel, a Yale professor of intellectual history, in 1937. In those dark days, with Fascism, not democracy, on the rise, Casner and Gabriel offered a wise and sober historian's creed: "We live today in perilous times; so did many of our forefathers. They sometimes made mistakes; let us strive to learn not to repeat these errors. The generations which lived before us left us a heritage of noble ideals; let us hold fast to these." Above all, they wanted students to understand the idea of democracy.
...What accounts for the rise of American democracy? Casner and Gabriel tried to answer that question ... by telling a story. That was a good idea. The United States got its start as a story. It begins: "When in the course of human events.
..." It has a moral: "All men are created equal." It even has a villain, George III, on whose machinations the plot turns: "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."
To say that the United States is a story is not to say that it is fiction; it is, instead, to suggest that it follows certain narrative conventions. All nations are places, but they are also acts of imagination. Who has a part in a nation's story, like who can become a citizen and who has a right to vote, isn't foreordained, or even stable. The story's plot, like the nation's borders and the nature of its electorate, is always shifting. Laws are passed and wars are fought to keep some people in and others out. Who tells the story, like who writes the laws and who wages the wars, is always part of that struggle.
Consider the Declaration of Independence. In March 1776, two months before John Adams was appointed to serve with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman, on a committee charged with drafting a declaration of independence, Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband. "I long to hear that you have declared an independency," she began.
Adams wrote back in April. "As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh," he began. "We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient, that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented." He refused to take her story–about the rule of men over women men–seriously. "Depend upon it," he resolved, "we know better than to repeal our masculine systems."
The story of America isn't carved in stone, or even inked on parchment; it is, instead, told, and fought over, again and again. It could have gone a thousand other ways. Even the Declaration of Independence could have gone a thousand other ways. In June and into the first days of July, it went through draft after draft. In his original draft, Jefferson, a slave owner, included a breathless paragraph in which he blamed the king for slavery, ... for his thwarting of colonial efforts to abolish the slave trade, ... and for support for proclamations promising freedom to slaves who joined the British army.
Jefferson's fellow delegates could not abide it. To some, it went too far; to others, it didn't go half far enough. It was struck out almost entirely.
If Adams had listened to his wife, if Jefferson had prevailed, if a thousand other things had gone a thousand other ways, the Declaration of Independence would have come out differently. Instead, the story told in the Declaration of Independence established the equality of all men (but not of women), decried tyranny (but not slavery), and chronicled the king's "long train of abuses and usurpations" to justify what was otherwise treason as necessary to the colonists' "future security." It used the past to make an argument about the future.
The Declaration of Independence is exceptionally beautiful as a piece of writing and as a statement of political philosophy, but using the past to make an argument about the future is far from exceptional; it is, instead, a feature of political rhetoric, always and everywhere. Politics involves elections and votes and money and power, but the heart of politics is describing how things came to be the way they are in such a way as to convince people that you know how to make things the way they ought to be.
This is curious, and worth pondering, because it reveals how much politics has in common with history. Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationship between the past and the present. It's what history and politics share–a vantage on the past–that makes writing the history of politics fraught. And it's what they don't share that makes the study of history vital. Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence.
...I began writing the essays in this book in 2005, not long after I started teaching at Harvard. All but one of these essays first appeared in The New Yorker. I wrote them because I wanted to learn how to tell stories better. But mostly I wrote them because I wanted to try to explain how history works, and how it's different from politics.
History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn't quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak. Also, what people will tell you about the past is very often malarkey. The essays in this book concern documents—things like travel narratives, the Constitution, ballots, the inaugural address, the presidential biography, the campaign biography, the I.O.U., and the dime novel. Historical inquiry relies on standards of evidence because documents aren't to be trusted. John Smith, the swashbuckling founder of Virginia, titled an account of his adventures True Travels, even though he made most of it up. One way to read this book, then, is as a study of the
American tall tale. My advice is to keep one eyebrow cocked and watch out for shifty-looking characters with ink-stained hands and narrators who keep ducking into doorways. ...
I didn't write the essays in this book with an eye toward offering a novel interpretation of American history. Still, it strikes me that, taken together, they do make an argument, and it is this: the rise of American democracy is bound up with the history of reading and writing, which is one of the reasons the study of American history is inseparable from the study of American literature. In the early United States, literacy rates rose and the price of books and magazines and newspapers fell during the same decades that suffrage was being extended. With everything from constitutions and ballots to almanacs and novels, Americans wrote and read their way into a political culture inked and stamped and pressed in print.
I've stitched all these essays together here, like the pieces of a quilt, and I've arranged them chronologically, from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. They cover the length of American history; by no means do they cover its breadth. This book does not tell "the story of America." No one can write that story. This is, instead, a study of the story.
Notes: Questions:
Your notes should focus on key ideas and defining terms you do not know.
Your questions may be used in the in-class discussion. As such, you must prepare at least three, and you must ensure they are high-quality and high-impact. A high-quality and high-impact question:
must not be a yes or no question;
should be open to debate;
should be challenging to answer, without an obvious likely response; and
should be specifically addressing a major issue of importance from the reading.
Source: Jill Lepore, The Story of America: Essays on Origins, 2012.
In 1938, if you had a dollar and seventy-two cents, you could buy a copy of The Rise of American Democracy, a seven hundred-page hardcover about the size of a biggish Bible or a Boy Scout Handbook. While a Bible's worth is hard to measure, the scout guide, at fifty cents, was an awfully good bargain and an excellent book to have on hand if you were shipwrecked on a desert island, not least because it included a chapter on How to Make Fire without Matches. But The Rise of American Democracy promised, invaluably, "to make clear how Americans have come to live and to believe as they do." It is also a very good read. "A Simple Book," its ad copy boasted. "Paragraphs average three to a page.
Sentences are short." Better yet: "A Democracy Theme runs through the whole text."
The Rise of American Democracy was written by Mabel B. Casner, a Connecticut schoolteacher, and Ralph Henry Ga- briel, a Yale professor of intellectual history, in 1937. In those dark days, with Fascism, not democracy, on the rise, Casner and Gabriel offered a wise and sober historian's creed: "We live today in perilous times; so did many of our forefathers. They sometimes made mistakes; let us strive to learn not to repeat these errors. The generations which lived before us left us a heritage of noble ideals; let us hold fast to these." Above all, they wanted students to understand the idea of democracy.
...What accounts for the rise of American democracy? Casner and Gabriel tried to answer that question ... by telling a story. That was a good idea. The United States got its start as a story. It begins: "When in the course of human events.
..." It has a moral: "All men are created equal." It even has a villain, George III, on whose machinations the plot turns: "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."
To say that the United States is a story is not to say that it is fiction; it is, instead, to suggest that it follows certain narrative conventions. All nations are places, but they are also acts of imagination. Who has a part in a nation's story, like who can become a citizen and who has a right to vote, isn't foreordained, or even stable. The story's plot, like the nation's borders and the nature of its electorate, is always shifting. Laws are passed and wars are fought to keep some people in and others out. Who tells the story, like who writes the laws and who wages the wars, is always part of that struggle.
Consider the Declaration of Independence. In March 1776, two months before John Adams was appointed to serve with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman, on a committee charged with drafting a declaration of independence, Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband. "I long to hear that you have declared an independency," she began.
Adams wrote back in April. "As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh," he began. "We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient, that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented." He refused to take her story–about the rule of men over women men–seriously. "Depend upon it," he resolved, "we know better than to repeal our masculine systems."
The story of America isn't carved in stone, or even inked on parchment; it is, instead, told, and fought over, again and again. It could have gone a thousand other ways. Even the Declaration of Independence could have gone a thousand other ways. In June and into the first days of July, it went through draft after draft. In his original draft, Jefferson, a slave owner, included a breathless paragraph in which he blamed the king for slavery, ... for his thwarting of colonial efforts to abolish the slave trade, ... and for support for proclamations promising freedom to slaves who joined the British army.
Jefferson's fellow delegates could not abide it. To some, it went too far; to others, it didn't go half far enough. It was struck out almost entirely.
If Adams had listened to his wife, if Jefferson had prevailed, if a thousand other things had gone a thousand other ways, the Declaration of Independence would have come out differently. Instead, the story told in the Declaration of Independence established the equality of all men (but not of women), decried tyranny (but not slavery), and chronicled the king's "long train of abuses and usurpations" to justify what was otherwise treason as necessary to the colonists' "future security." It used the past to make an argument about the future.
The Declaration of Independence is exceptionally beautiful as a piece of writing and as a statement of political philosophy, but using the past to make an argument about the future is far from exceptional; it is, instead, a feature of political rhetoric, always and everywhere. Politics involves elections and votes and money and power, but the heart of politics is describing how things came to be the way they are in such a way as to convince people that you know how to make things the way they ought to be.
This is curious, and worth pondering, because it reveals how much politics has in common with history. Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationship between the past and the present. It's what history and politics share–a vantage on the past–that makes writing the history of politics fraught. And it's what they don't share that makes the study of history vital. Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence.
...I began writing the essays in this book in 2005, not long after I started teaching at Harvard. All but one of these essays first appeared in The New Yorker. I wrote them because I wanted to learn how to tell stories better. But mostly I wrote them because I wanted to try to explain how history works, and how it's different from politics.
History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn't quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak. Also, what people will tell you about the past is very often malarkey. The essays in this book concern documents—things like travel narratives, the Constitution, ballots, the inaugural address, the presidential biography, the campaign biography, the I.O.U., and the dime novel. Historical inquiry relies on standards of evidence because documents aren't to be trusted. John Smith, the swashbuckling founder of Virginia, titled an account of his adventures True Travels, even though he made most of it up. One way to read this book, then, is as a study of the
American tall tale. My advice is to keep one eyebrow cocked and watch out for shifty-looking characters with ink-stained hands and narrators who keep ducking into doorways. ...
I didn't write the essays in this book with an eye toward offering a novel interpretation of American history. Still, it strikes me that, taken together, they do make an argument, and it is this: the rise of American democracy is bound up with the history of reading and writing, which is one of the reasons the study of American history is inseparable from the study of American literature. In the early United States, literacy rates rose and the price of books and magazines and newspapers fell during the same decades that suffrage was being extended. With everything from constitutions and ballots to almanacs and novels, Americans wrote and read their way into a political culture inked and stamped and pressed in print.
I've stitched all these essays together here, like the pieces of a quilt, and I've arranged them chronologically, from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. They cover the length of American history; by no means do they cover its breadth. This book does not tell "the story of America." No one can write that story. This is, instead, a study of the story.
Notes: Questions:
Answers
GPT-4o mini
### Notes
1. **The Rise of American Democracy**:
- Authored by Mabel B. Casner and Ralph Henry Gabriel, aimed to clarify how Americans have come to live and believe as they do.
- Contains a moral viewpoint regarding democracy amidst rising totalitarianism in the 1930s.
- Emphasizes learning from past mistakes to preserve noble ideals.
2. **Narrative Structure**:
- Lepore discusses the idea that a nation is like a story, evolving over time.
- The story of a nation includes key elements: plot, characters, and conflicts (both internal and external).
- The inherent instability in who can participate in a nation's democracy reflects deeper social tensions and political struggles.
3. **Declaration of Independence**:
- Highlights that the document is a narrative that establishes foundational democratic principles, yet selectively excludes women and acknowledges slavery.
- Historical context reveals how political narratives can reshape perceptions of equality and rights.
4. **Politics vs. History**:
- Politics is concerned with opinion and the narrative around future outcomes, while history is accountable to evidence and seeks to present facts about the past.
- Lepore aims to highlight the differences and intersections between narrating history and engaging in political discourse.
5. **The Nature of Historical Inquiry**:
- History as a form of storytelling that requires argumentation backed by evidence.
- The importance of critical engagement with sources; documents can be misleading and should be scrutinized.
6. **Literacy and Democracy**:
- Draws a connection between rising literacy rates, accessibility of literature and media, and the expansion of suffrage.
- Suggests that the act of reading and writing contributed significantly to the development of American democratic ideals.
7. **Approach of the Book**:
- The essays are presented as a cohesive argument rather than a singular narrative of American history.
- Covers a chronological span from the 16th century to the 21st, focusing on key documents and cultural artifacts.
### Questions
1. **What role does storytelling play in shaping a nation's identity, and how does this influence contemporary political discourse in the United States?**
- This question invites discussion on the power of narrative in politics and history and whether America's identity is still being defined through stories.
2. **In what ways does the exclusion of certain groups from the democratic narrative influence the modern understanding of democracy, and how can we rectify these historical oversights?**
- This question aims to examine the implications of historical narrative exclusions and engage with potential solutions or frameworks for more inclusive democratic practices.
3. **How can the critical examination of historical documents, as Lepore suggests, shift our understanding of pivotal moments in American history and their relevance to current political challenges?**
- Here, the focus is on the relationship between historical scrutiny and contemporary political issues, asking how revisiting past narratives could provide insights for today's democratic landscape.
1. **The Rise of American Democracy**:
- Authored by Mabel B. Casner and Ralph Henry Gabriel, aimed to clarify how Americans have come to live and believe as they do.
- Contains a moral viewpoint regarding democracy amidst rising totalitarianism in the 1930s.
- Emphasizes learning from past mistakes to preserve noble ideals.
2. **Narrative Structure**:
- Lepore discusses the idea that a nation is like a story, evolving over time.
- The story of a nation includes key elements: plot, characters, and conflicts (both internal and external).
- The inherent instability in who can participate in a nation's democracy reflects deeper social tensions and political struggles.
3. **Declaration of Independence**:
- Highlights that the document is a narrative that establishes foundational democratic principles, yet selectively excludes women and acknowledges slavery.
- Historical context reveals how political narratives can reshape perceptions of equality and rights.
4. **Politics vs. History**:
- Politics is concerned with opinion and the narrative around future outcomes, while history is accountable to evidence and seeks to present facts about the past.
- Lepore aims to highlight the differences and intersections between narrating history and engaging in political discourse.
5. **The Nature of Historical Inquiry**:
- History as a form of storytelling that requires argumentation backed by evidence.
- The importance of critical engagement with sources; documents can be misleading and should be scrutinized.
6. **Literacy and Democracy**:
- Draws a connection between rising literacy rates, accessibility of literature and media, and the expansion of suffrage.
- Suggests that the act of reading and writing contributed significantly to the development of American democratic ideals.
7. **Approach of the Book**:
- The essays are presented as a cohesive argument rather than a singular narrative of American history.
- Covers a chronological span from the 16th century to the 21st, focusing on key documents and cultural artifacts.
### Questions
1. **What role does storytelling play in shaping a nation's identity, and how does this influence contemporary political discourse in the United States?**
- This question invites discussion on the power of narrative in politics and history and whether America's identity is still being defined through stories.
2. **In what ways does the exclusion of certain groups from the democratic narrative influence the modern understanding of democracy, and how can we rectify these historical oversights?**
- This question aims to examine the implications of historical narrative exclusions and engage with potential solutions or frameworks for more inclusive democratic practices.
3. **How can the critical examination of historical documents, as Lepore suggests, shift our understanding of pivotal moments in American history and their relevance to current political challenges?**
- Here, the focus is on the relationship between historical scrutiny and contemporary political issues, asking how revisiting past narratives could provide insights for today's democratic landscape.