These Truths (Lepore) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—August 27, 1966
• Where—Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Tufts University; M.A., University of Michigan; Ph.D., Yale University
• Awards—Bancroft Prize (more below)
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts


Jill Lepore is an American historian. She is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and author of These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics.

Early life
Lepore was born and grew up in West Boylston, a small town outside Worcester, Massachusetts, the daughter of a junior high school principal and an art teacher. Lepore had no early desire to become a historian, but claims to have wanted to be a writer from the age of six. She entered college with a Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship, starting as a math major. Eventually she left ROTC and changed her major to English.

Lepore earned her B.A. in English from Tufts University in 1987, an M.A. in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 1990, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1995, where she specialized in the history of early America.[4]

Career
Lepore taught at the University of California-San Diego from 1995 to 1996 and at Boston University from 1996 before starting her Ph.D. at Harvard in 2003. She now teaches American political history, focusing on missing evidence in historical records and articles.

Lepore has defined history as "the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence." To that end, she gathers historical evidence that allows scholars to study and analyze political processes and behaviors.

Non-academic writings
Her essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, Th Journal of American History, Foreign Affairs, Yale Law Journal, American Scholar, and American Quarterly.

Three of her books derive from her New Yorker essays: The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (2012), a finalist for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction; The Story of America: Essays on Origins (2012), shortlisted for the PEN Literary Award for the Art of the Essay; and The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle for American History (2010). The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014) is a winner of the 2015 American History Book Prize.

Awards and honors
1999 Bancroft Prize for The Name of War
1999 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society for The Name of War
1999 Berkshire Prize for The Name of War
2006 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (nonfiction) for New York Burning
2006 Pulitzer Prize for History finalist for New York Burning
2012 Sarah Josepha Hale Award
2013 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay runner-up
2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction finalist for Book of Ages
2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction finalist for The Mansion of Happiness
2014 Elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
2014 Mark Lynton History Prize for Book of Ages
2015 American History Book Prize for The Secret History of Wonder Woman
2016 John P. McGovern Award, Cosmos Club Foundation
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/4/2019.)