Jill Lepore is Professor of History at Harvard University and chair of the History and Literature Program. A contributor to The New Yorker, Lepore has also written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and American Scholar, as well as for many scholarly publications, including the Journal of American History and the American Historical Review. In 1999, she co-founded the online magazine Common-place.
In addition to the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, New York Burning was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her other books include A is for American (2002) and The Name of War (1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, the Berkshire Prize and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award.
Lepore has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society, and has served as a consultant on many television and film projects, including PBS’s The American Experience. She received her B.A. in English from the Tufts University, an M.A. in American Culture from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University.
Jill Lepore is restless.
The Harvard historian prefers to walk while she thinks, and stand when she talks. And so she stood before perhaps 800 guests gathered in Cleveland to hear her ponder whether a divided nation can own a shared past.
“A nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, will fight forever over the meaning of its history,” she writes in These Truths: A History of the United States, a 1,000-page civics lesson that W.W. Norton will publish in September.
Sweeping American histories were once common...
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Did Marvel get it right with A-Force, its latest contribution to the world of female superheroes? Not if you ask Jill Lepore, Harvard University history professor and author of last year’s well-reviewed The Secret History of Wonder Woman. In a recent op-ed for The New Yorker, Lepore called the Avenger-type squad "porn stars."
"Maybe it’s not possible to create reasonable female comic-book superheroes, since their origins are so tangled up with magazines for men," writes Lepore, who won a 2006 Anisfield-Wolf prize for New York Burning...
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With a new year comes new reading lists. We at Anisfield-Wolf rounded up some of the new and not-so-new books we'd like to read over the next few weeks. If this proves popular, we'll keep adding books here as suggestions and have a discussion about what we've enjoyed over on our Facebook page.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel
Stephen L. Carter - The Emperor of Ocean Park
Jill Lepore - The Mansion of Happiness
August Wilson - Fences
Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne
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200 Years & More: Negative Political Ads Remain... by FORAtv
In an extremely heated election season, sometimes it's worth taking a moment to breathe. With millions being spent in ads on both sides, it's clear that messaging is powerful in terms of getting people to vote for your side. But has the rhetoric gotten nastier? Are we seeing a new "low" in campaign ads or is this just the nature of politics?
Historian Jill Lepore (2006 Anisfield-Wolf award winner) explored the history of presidential campaigns at the 2012 New Yorker festival...
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Our "New On The Bookshelf" series highlights new works from past Anisfield-Wolf authors.
It's a question many of us don't like to think about that often: What happens when we die? But 2006 nonfiction winner Jill Lepore's new book takes it a step further, analyzing our role in creating life—and death. In her new book, The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death, Lepore takes what could be an austere topic and infuses it with lots of surprises along the way. Lepore's book couldn't be more timely, particularly in today's...
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Jill Lepore doesn't think so. As part of a series of discussions sponsored by the Center for Civil Discourse at the University of Massachusetts, the 2006 Anisfield-Wolf winner shares her thoughts on whether our society is more or less civil than any other period in society.
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