'The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril'; Jill Lepore on writing the story of America, the rise and fall of the fact, and how women's intellectual authority is undermined

"Let facts be submitted to a candid world," Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. If on the one hand we have a bunch of academic historians saying American history consists of conflict among groups who are generally powerless relative to the federal government, and on the other hand we have a public history that is about the power of the presidency and that ignores conflict among groups, you just have partisanship. A. I call the book These Truths to invoke those truths in the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson describes, with the revision provided by Franklin, as "self-evident" — political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. Since serious academic historians have to a large degree retreated, that space is taken up by other people.