American historian, Harvard professor of American history, and New Yorker staff writer whose unusual combination of academic rigor and public-facing prose has made her one of the most widely read historians of the American experiment. Lepore's training is in early American history — her dissertation on King Philip's War, published as The Name of War (1998), won the Bancroft Prize — but the gravitational pull of her career has been toward the long-form synthetic history written for general readers that she has made peculiarly her own.
These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) attempted, at one thousand pages, a single-volume history of the United States organized around the question of whether the country has lived up to its founding truths — political equality, natural rights, the consent of the governed. Lepore's method is archival, episodic, and biographical: she tells the national story through individual lives recovered from forgotten or marginal sources, which lets her take in figures and episodes the standard narratives skip. The book is by turns hopeful and unsparing, and unusual in its willingness to take the American founding's claims seriously enough to indict the country for failing them.
Her other books range widely — The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014) on the comic-book character's surprisingly feminist-utopian origins; If Then (2020) on a forgotten 1960s Cold War data-modeling firm that tried to predict elections; The Deadline (2023), a collection of her New Yorker essays. She hosts the podcast The Last Archive — an essay-podcast on how we know what we know — which extends her style into audio.