These Truths: A History of the United States

“As summer faded to fall, the free people of the United States, finding the Constitution folded into their newspapers and almanacs, were asked to decide whether or not to ratify it, even as they went about baling hay, milling corn, tanning leather, singing hymns, and letting out the seams on last year’s winter coats, for mothers and fathers grown fatter, and letting down the hems, for children grown taller.”

Lepore illustrates what mundane colonial life must have looked like. She is careful to denote “free people,” helping the reader to realize that life would have looked different for white indentured servants and, particularly, for enslaved Africans. She describes people who are industrious, agrarian, and simple—people who may not have understood the seriousness of the task they were being asked to perform by the more learned delegates, but who were entrusted with the responsibility of determining the fate of their new nation.

“Its infancy is preserved, like baby teeth kept in a glass jar, in the four parchment sheets of the Constitution, in the pages of almanacs that chart the weather of a long-ago climate, and in hundreds of newspapers, where essays for and against the new system of government appeared alongside the shipping news, auction notices, and advertisements for the return of people who never were their own masters—women and children, slaves and servants—and who had run away, hoping to ordain and establish, for themselves and their posterity, the blessings of liberty.”

Lepore describes how the United States’ nascence is preserved in documents. She analogizes these documents to a parent’s retention of baby teeth to show how these artifacts work to show the transition from one stage to another—British colonies to independent nation. She contrasts the colonialists’ pursuit of independent government with their simultaneous embrace of slavery.

“Americans are descended from conquerors and from the conquered, from the people held as slaves and from the people who held them, from the Union and from the Confederacy, from Protestants and from Jews, from Muslims and from Catholics, and from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration.”

Lepore illustrates the motley and contrasting elements that make up the American populace. This passage also demonstrates how wondrous it is that the United States has survived as a democracy, despite the coexistence of historically antagonistic groups within its borders.