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The 2-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence arrives throughout intense disputes about American historical past, because the Trump Administration calls for a extra glorifying view of the nation’s previous at federally run historic websites and in federally funded initiatives. The workers author Jill Lepore (who gained the Pulitzer Prize in Historical past this month for her e-book “We the Folks: A Historical past of the U.S. Structure”) guest-hosts a particular episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour about this fraught second, reflecting on the accountability of educational historians to form the general public debate. She compares our second with the bicentennial—which fell within the wake of the Vietnam Battle and the scandals of Richard Nixon’s Presidency—in a dialog with the Yale historian Beverly Gage. Lepore appears on the nature of the nation’s conflict over historical past with Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism College and a workers author at The New Yorker. They talk about the Donald Trump-approved “Freedom 250” projection on the Washington Monument, and discuss how Individuals can meaningfully take part within the semiquincentennial. If “we’re sitting round ready for the occupant of the White Home to inform us what American historical past means,” Lepore says, “you simply type of wish to stroll into site visitors.”
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