America in Free Fall? Historian Jill Lepore on the US at 250

Jill Lepore does not want to have dinner with the Founding Fathers. "They're dead. They've been dead for a very long time," the Harvard historian says flatly. "They lived in an era where women died in childbirth. Your children all died of disease and malaria. I don't want to go back to that time." This refusal to romanticize the past is central to how Lepore thinks about the American present—a present she describes as "free fall off a cliff."

Lepore, whose book We the People won a Pulitzer Prize, is an unusual historian. None of her degrees are in history. She worked as a secretary at Harvard, wrote novels during the workday, and arrived at the study of the past through a sideways route: she was an ROTC cadet who left the military after concluding she could not ethically work on Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Her interest in history, she says, is not about debates among historians over how to interpret moments of change. It is about "the relationship between the past and the present" and finding explanations that offer "a way for me to think about how to escape sometimes what feels like difficult present moments."

The Constitution Was Meant to Change