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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Jill Lepore** (0:09)
We are a very complicated country with a very complicated relationship to family, community. I think all Americans kind of wrestle with that, celebrate that, wrestle with it, wonder whether we have lived up to the nation's ideals. These are questions maybe more at this moment than in any other as we're on the eve of the nation's 250th anniversary.

**Mishal Husain** (0:30)
Jill Lepore, Pulitzer Prize-winning Historian of the United States. I think from your voice, I feel that this weighs very heavily on you this moment in time.

**Jill Lepore** (0:42)
I think it weighs heavily on everyone, whether it's their job to think about it all day or not. We are in freefall off a cliff here. I don't know when we land.

**Mishal Husain** (0:55)
From Bloomberg Weekend, this is the Mishal Husain Show. I'm Mishal Husain.
America's big birthday is upon us. It was on the 4th of July 1776 that a relatively short text, the Declaration of Independence, was formally adopted in Philadelphia. A final departure of British troops from the United States was still some years away, and so was the other key foundational document of the country, the Constitution, which wasn't even drafted until 1787
That's the text that's our route into America's story this July 4th. The Harvard historian Jill Lepore joins me to take us through her monumental work, We The People. It's a book on how the Constitution came about, and crucially, how there was an expectation that it would likely change over time. This is not, however, an episode entirely set in the past, because Jill Lepore is acutely alive to the pressures of our time, to a contested sense of what America is or what it should be. She's also unusual in her background, and we'll talk about this early on. She's very far from an ivory tower type historian. She's served in the US military, and her route into teaching history at Harvard is a sideways one. Plus, she's prolific. Articles, a podcast series on Elon Musk, and many books. We The People has just won her a Pulitzer Prize, and her next book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which is about technology and democracy, is out next month. So here is Jill Lepore on America Past and Present.
Oh, hello.

**Jill Lepore** (3:08)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Mishal Husain** (3:09)
Anything in particular on your mind today that you're particularly thinking about, or state of the world?

**Jill Lepore** (3:16)
Yeah. You try to think about lunch just to get through the day, really. That's my plan.

**Mishal Husain** (3:23)
I'd love to begin with a sense of you before we move on to your work, particularly because I was struck by the fact that you are one of the foremost scholars and writers on American history, and yet you have an unusual background as a professor of history, because neither of your first two degrees are in history.

**Jill Lepore** (3:41)
None of my degrees are in history.
Yeah. I always wanted to just be a writer, and graduated early with a degree in English. As I couldn't afford to stay in college, I worked as a secretary, actually here at Harvard for a while, and wrote novels during the workday and sat in on classes. I was a high school athlete, Girl Scout, person with a great sense of civic duty, had no money for college, and I got an ROTC scholarship to go to college.

**Mishal Husain** (4:08)
Which is the system by which your tuition fees and other expenses are paid for in exchange for agreeing to serve in the military afterwards.

**Jill Lepore** (4:15)
Agreeing to serve, yeah.

**Mishal Husain** (4:17)
Then what happened? What changed? You're talking to us now about your books on constitutional and other history, but you could have been sitting in the Pentagon listening to Pete Hegseth speak.

**Jill Lepore** (4:27)
I do sometimes think about that. Yeah. And all my friends in college were ROTC kids. You know, you incur a service obligation when you went to your sophomore year.
And I actually loved ROTC. But at the time, Reagan's foreign policy was really interventionist, for instance, in Haiti. And in particular, Reagan was exploring what was colloquially known as the Star Wars program, the Strategic Defense Initiative. He was going to build a missile shield, something like the Israeli Iron Dome right around the planet to end the Cold War. And so all the students were engineers. And everyone thought the Star Wars plan was completely nonsensical as an engineering design. And I thought politically it was also nonsensical. And I went and had a meeting with my commanding officer. And I said, I don't think I could work on that.