THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER The capstone book in a trilogy from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Lead and The American Story and host of Bloomberg TV's The David Rubenstein Showâ American icons and historians on the ever-evolving American experiment, featuring Ken Burns, Madeleine Albright, Wynton Marsalis, Billie Jean King, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and many more. In this lively collection of conversationsâthe third in a series from David Rubensteinâsome of our nations' greatest minds explore the inspiring story of America as a grand experiment in democracy, culture, innovation, and ideas. - Jill Lepore on the promise of America - Madeleine Albright on the American immigrant - Ken Burns on war - Henry Louis Gates Jr. on reconstruction - Elaine Weiss on suffrage - John Meacham on civil rights - Walter Isaacson on innovation - David McCullough on the Wright Brothers - John Barry on pandemics and public health - Wynton Marsalis on music - Billie Jean King on sports - Rita Moreno on film Exploring the diverse make-up of our country's DNA through interviews with Pulitzer Prizeâwinning historians, diplomats, music legends, and sports giants, The American Experiment captures the dynamic arc of a young country reinventing itself in real-time. Through these enlightening conversations, the American spirit comes alive, revealing the setbacks, suffering, invention, ingenuity, and social movements that continue to shape our vision of what America isâand what it can be.
Frequently asked questions
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on âCancel Subscriptionâ - itâs as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time youâve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access The American Experiment by David M. Rubenstein in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
âWe hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.â
âPreamble to the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
JILL LEPORE on 400 Years of American History
David Woods Kemper â41 Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law, Harvard University; author of These Truths: A History of the United States and 13 other books; Staff Writer for the New Yorker
âIt is our obligation as historians and as citizens to think about the relationship between the past and the present and to reckon with whether the nation has lived up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence.â
From the beginning, America was an idealâa new land, with fresh opportunities for those adventuresome enough to pursue them, in the belief that in so doing they could create a new, better life for themselves and their families.
As America grew from outposts and thriving colonies into the United States of America, those responsible for creating a new country and government idealized their invention: their government would provide liberties, freedoms, equality with a benevolence that other governments had never explicitly provided.
These would be guaranteed (albeit only for white males) in founding documents that would take on the character of religious iconsâi.e., the Constitution was deserving of faith and allegiance, rather than any leader or group of leaders.
Over the centuries, this experiment in democratic self-governance evolved, as social mores, legal principles, economic realities, foreign challenges, and cultural perspectives changed, though not always for the countryâs betterment.
Capturing in an understandable way how this governing experiment occurred over the centuries has always been a challenge for observers of America. Doing so in a way that really captures the perspectives of those who were not the powerful and traditional leaders of American society has truly eluded a great many historians. But not Jill Lepore.
Her epic history of the United States, These Truths, provides a look at the country from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, in a novel-like writing style that focuses on those whose voices have not always been reflected in comprehensive books about the nation.
That should probably not be a surprise, for Jill Lepore is not only an endowed professor of American history at Harvard University but the author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed books and a regular and much-read contributor to the New Yorker on the subjects of history, law, and public policy.
With These Truths, Jill Lepore also essentially became the first woman to write a comprehensive history of the U.S.âhard to believe, but that is the case. Not surprisingly, she was able to bring a different perspective on some of the most important issues faced by women in our countryâs history, such as the right to own property, to vote, to hold office, to be paid fairly, to overcome career challenges, to confront sexual harassment and violence, and, in general, to have equal protection and opportunities.
In recounting the entire history of the United States, Jill Lepore has taken the American experimentâwith all of its ideals, challenges, successes, and failuresâand provided an overview of so many of the American genes that have given us America in 2021.
I interviewed Jill Lepore at the New-York Historical Society on October 7, 2019. On reflection, my only regret about the interview was that Professor Lepore had not written the U.S. history textbooks I read in high school or college. I know that her doing so would have assured I actually wanted to finish the whole book.
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): For most people, writing a nine-hundred-page book on American history would take a lifetime. Did you ever regret doing it while you were working through it?
JILL LEPORE (JL): It was really fun to write, actually. Thatâs embarrassing to say. I feel bad when people have writerâs block, because I have a problemâI write too much.
I decided to write the book because Iâve been teaching this material for decades nowâfor maybe thirty yearsâand over the years Iâve been asked, here and there, would I write a single volume on the American Revolution? Iâve always thought textbook writing would be depressing. It doesnât really come alive on the page.
I was asked, one more time, to write a single-volume, single-narrator history of the United States as a textbook. As an American political historian, I thought, âI should take up this invitation to do this work of public service.â I thought the nation needed an accessible, new history that took into account the incredible revolution in scholarship over the last half century.
DR: You begin your book with a discussion about the âdiscoveryâ of this country by early settlers, and you talk about Christopher Columbus. He has been vilified by some people in recent years. Do you think vilifying him was appropriate?
JL: I think we should spend some time collectively rejecting the either/or there. I understand weâre inclined to ask, âIs he a villain or is he a hero?â
Teachers and textbook writers understand that the story of the United States begins tens of thousands of years ago, with migrations of people we would now call Indigenous Americans, and that this story is vitally important to who we are today. The story of European conquest is a story of tremendous violence, of religious violence, of a legal regime that is in many ways with us and still bears a lot of scrutiny.
That said, it was an interesting and puzzling question for me: Where to start a history of the United States? The easiest, straightforward way is âIâm going to start with the Declaration of Independence.â Thatâs when the United States begins.
But that doesnât really offer an explanation for a country wrestling with these problems. How is it that we are descended both from European colonizers and from Indigenous peoples and from Africans kidnapped from their homes and brought as forced laborers? To be a nation, we have to all accept that weâre descended from all these people.
DR: You point out in your book that when Columbus arrived, he didnât actually hit North America, he hit some islands in the Caribbean, and that there were ten or twenty million people living on the continent. Is that right?
JL: Yes. There were many more tens of millions than that. The European invasion of the Americas was a genocide. A lot of those deaths were caused by disease. The acts of violence, the forced enslavement of Indigenous peoples, the attempt to erase the sophistication and diversity of Native cultures: all this is a legacy whose agony we bear with us still.
The reason I begin with Columbus and 1492 and then move backward to Indigenous life earlier was that I decided to tell the story in large part about how our political arrangements are the product of our technologies of communication as much as our ideas.
It was extremely significant that Columbus could write in his diary and tell the queen and king of Spain he took possession of these lands, and decided that these people have no language, because he didnât understand it. The technology of writing is hugely important in that historical moment, and we can see the power dynamics differently if we pay attention to technology.
DR: When I was in grade school, I remember people saying that Columbus went to discover a new route to the East, but it wasnât clear that the world was round and he was maybe risking falling off the globe.
That wasnât the case. He was just looking for a cheaper way to get to Asia?
JL: Yes. But he was also a former slave trader and, in effect, a crusader. He wasnât only a seeker of knowledge.
DR: I like to cite him as the first private equity investor, because he had a deal with Queen Isabella. He got 5 percent of the gold and 10 percent of the profits, but there was no gold and no profits, so in the end he didnât really make any money out of it. But itâs called the United States of America. Why didnât Columbus get billing rights?
JL: Let me just take seriously your private equity argument. There is a really important interpretation to offer with regard to the European conquest of the Americas, which is that it makes possible the emergence of capitalism, because of the vast wealth that Europeans extract from the natural resources and from the forced labor of Native peoples and Africans and bring to Europe. That consolidates wealth in a way that makes possible the emergence of capitalism. Setting aside how we want to think about Columbus, on a much larger scale of economic history, it is a really important development.
The naming largely has to do with Amerigo Vespucci, who wrote a book called Mundus Novus (The New World), after his voyage to what came to be called Brazil. When a German mapmaker named Martin WaldseemĂźller went to make a map in 1507, he didnât know anything really about Columbus, but he had read Vespucciâs book, which had been widely translated. On the map, as an honor to Vespucci, he called this blob of land âAmerica.â
DR: The original sin of this country was slavery. The English people who came over to colonize werenât slave owners at the time. How did slavery get started in this country?
JL: Many of the English, in fact, were slave owners. They didnât bring enslaved people with them to New England, but many of them had already made voyages to or had family that had made voyages to the Caribbean and had slave plantations in places like Barbados and Jamaica.
The Atlantic trade in slaves dates to the middle of the fifteenth century and had its origins in Portugal and Spain engaging in raids of people along the West African coast. That happened before Columbus made his voyage. Itâs one of these terrible accidents of history that this new trade in people from West Africa was just beginning to churn when Portugal and Spain began founding colonies in the New World.
DR: I thought originally it was indentured servants who were the precursors of slaves here and who could, after a couple of years, become free.
JL: The first Portuguese slave-trading voyages begin in the 1440s, buying people and selling people as chattel. That is the case throughout South America, throughout the Caribbean, itâs the case in early Virginia, and it is also the case in New England.
Well into the eighteenth century, a lot of white people are indentured servants. Theyâre not free either. The conflation of âif youâre black, youâre enslaved, and if youâre white, youâre freeâ begins to emerge by the end of the seventeenth century.
DR: We ultimately had thirteen colonies. After the French and Indian War, the British said, âYou need to pay for some of the protection weâve given you,â and they began to impose taxes. That didnât work out to the satisfaction of colonial leaders. Do you think that the British could have prevented a revolution from occurring?
JL: A, they did prevent one, and B, there were two. A complicated answer. We now think about how there were thirteen colonies, but really there were twenty-six, because there were the thirteen colonies in the Caribbean, which nobody really distinguished in any meaningful way. From the vantage of London, those are the coloniesâall of them.
The Caribbean colonies are the ones England really wanted to keep. Those colonies, which were just brutal death camps for Africans, were the sugar plantations. That was where England was making the most money off its colonies.
The English colonists in the thirteen mainland colonies, when they were protesting first the sugar tax and the stamp tax and then later the taxes in the 1770s, kept trying to recruit the colonial assemblies in Barbados and Jamaica. Theyâre like, âWeâre sending a petition to Parliament complaining about this tax. Are you with us?â
In the Caribbean, these slave-owning plantation owners would say, âWe are outnumbered by our enslaved property thirty to one here. So you guys go off and rebel, but we actually need the British army.â During the war, Britain essentially made a choice to give up on the northern colonies, because why keep these sad colonies when all the riches are in the Caribbean?
DR: George Washington was seen as the general who won the war for us. Even if he hadnât been such a good general, would the British eventually have said, âGood-bye, we really donât get that much out of the North American coloniesâ?
JL: Counterfactuals are hard to give a compelling answer to. But I do want to say something about the other revolution, the one the northern colonies lost, which was the revolution of enslaved people who fought on the side of the British during the American Revolution because the British promised them their freedom.
The American victory was an incredible tragedy for enslaved people who were seeking their freedom. Britain had abolished slavery, and they had every reason to expect that the colonies would abolish slavery if they had not become independent.
DR: By the time of the Revolutionary War, there were about 450,000 enslaved Blacks in the United States, and about two million white Americans.
At the beginning of the Revolution, during the Second Continental Congress, a committee was formed to write an explanation of why they would break away from England if they voted to do so. The Declaration of Independence was written...
