Narrator: Jill Lepore is a professor of American History and affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University.

In 2005, she began contributing to the New Yorker writing about American history, law and politics.

Lepore's 2018 book, These Truths, a History of the United States was named one of Time Magazine's top 10 non-fiction books of the decade.

In her latest book, The Deadline Essays.

Lepore collects 46 essays that offer a prismatic portrait of Americans techno utopianism, frantic fractiousness and unprecedented and yet armed aimlessness.

Jill Lepore is joine by Congressman Jamie Raskin US representative from Maryland.

He is the ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

Raskin has authored several books including the New York Times number one best seller, Unthinkable, Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy.

This is Great Conversations Jill Lepore and Jamie Raskin recorded before a live audience at the University of Louisville Kentucky Author Forum.

[audience applauding] Well, very cool.

Welcome to the Kentucky Authors Forum.

-Thank you so much.

-And welcome to Kentucky.

It's my second time here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I went and paid tribute at Muhammad Ali's grave today.

-So, I feel annointed.

-And well said.

And you got your own Louisville Slugger too.

I got the little mini bar from the tour.

Well, this is an exciting possibility to talk to you about this magnificent new book that I want to brandish for our audience out there.

The Deadline by Jill Lepore.

Tell me as an historian what the difference is in the intellectual project of these truths from what you do in these essays, which are more snapshot vignettes on anything from Rachel Carson to Eugene Debs to the history of the bicycle and your involvement with bicycles and so on.

You know, in the 19th century essays were often referred to as fugitive pieces, which I love.

So, people would publish these collections of fugitive pieces just meaning that they were sort of fleeting, right?

So, there's a kind of fleeting quality maybe to the essays in The Deadline.

Whereas these truths was just this sort of 1000 page history of the United States that I published a few years back was really my attempt to truly be a historian instead of kind of also a journalist, which is what I'm also doing when I'm writing essays.

-Yeah.

-So, when I wrote these truths, like, I go to the library every week and get a pile of books because I was writing chronologically and I have this running joke with the security guard at the library.

Like he'd be like, what are you on now?

Did you get to Andrew Jackson yet?

You know, I bring a pile of books.

I read a bunch of books about a period in time.

Try to write a chapter, bring those books back, get another stack of books and try to just make sense of the sweep of American history for...

When I was a kid there were kind of like history books like that.

There were like national histories and that really fell out of favor really in the 1970s.

So you were trying to take it all in?

Yeah, I was trying to take it all in in like a big sweeping account that would sort of, like what is this country and what does this mean?

So, do you favor one of these forms of history over the other?

-I prefer writing essays -Jamie: Yeah.

because it's kind of in and out.

It's like a, I don't know, it's like a polka instead of a waltz, you know?

I don't know, just that the pace of it is better for me -like I'd rather do a polka.

-Jamie: Right.

And that security guard might have looked at you as kind of a fugitive, like maybe he thought you were taking some books or something.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, here's a great fugitive essay you've got in The Deadline and it revolves around Kentucky.

So, I thought it's about as good a place as any as to begin.

You tell the story of Lila and her brother John T Scopes who grew up in Kentucky, but he ended up going to teach biology in Tennessee and was the subject of a criminal prosecution for teaching evolution against the anti-evolution statute that had been adopted by the Tennessee legislature.

You point out something that I didn't know.

I'm sure most people don't know even in Kentucky, which is that there was an effort to pass that very same law in Kentucky essentially against the teaching of Darwinism and evolution and different kinds of science.

And it was the first place where they went with this campaign and the Tennessee legislature rejected it.

The Kentucky legislature rejected The Kentucky legislature rejected it.

The Tennessee legislature adopted it.

-Great.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

[audience applauding] So, now you use this as a launching pad to talk about the current move against the teaching of history about Jim Crow, apartheid in America, racism, slavery which the Governor of Florida assures us now was just a skills training mass apprenticeship program.

But you take what happened almost exactly a century ago with respect to evolution and Darwin and then you juxtapose it with what's going on today.

Tell us about what are the continuities and discontinuities in these two movements -against education?

-Yeah.

I found that really fun to research.

So, this was a case where sometimes explaining how essay came to be, explains, you know, what it tries to do.

So, there are all these bans going on banning critical race theory.

So, not just sort of state legislatures requiring you must teach these 25 primary source documents.

Every school child must read, you know, Ronald Reagan's time for choosing or something, whatever these kind of requirements, then they were also bans.

And so, I was asked to try to kind of make sense of that historically and the jostling over it in state legislatures had been fairly aggressively reported.

Like people knew what states were doing what and there were the funny jokes about the this and that.

But I was sort of baffled by the phrase parentsghts because I hadn't really heard it.

I felt like I hadn't heard that as part of like American political discourse.

I got really curious, like, how do these claims for mandated school curriculums and censored books how do they hinge themselves to this notion of parental rights?

Where did this come from?

And that's where I kind of went diving in and looking for the origins of parents' rights as a political claim.

And it dates to the 1920s, maybe a little bit earlier even.

And it's most widely used in these attempts to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools, chiefly in the South.

And I had known nothing about the Kentucky story.

So, it's in 1922 so the time I was working on peace was 2022.

Had a nice symmetry.

It was 100 years ago that Kentucky defeated a proposal, but you buy a single vote in the Kentucky legislature to ban the teaching of evolution.

And, so I liked that story because I didn't know that John Scopes was from Kentucky.

I thought he was from Tennessee and I didn't know he had a sister and I didn't know she was a teacher and she got fired, she was teaching math, but she got fired for failing, foe being unwilling to denounce.

She taught in Paducah for being a teacher of algebra in Paducah but somehow the fact that she wouldn't denounce the teaching of evolution meant that she lost her job.

So, I like that story.

I like the way of animating the giving John Scopes a kind of back story in Kentucky and also seeing has the legislature succeed in defeating such a motion.

But what I really had not understood at all was the origins and then the legacy of parents rights as a claim.

So, parent as a claim emerges because school was not compulsory anywhere in the United States.

It wasn't generally even offered or free for most until the 1830s or 40s.

And then it was not universal free public schooling.

It was sort of maybe boys could maybe get, you know, white boys could maybe get free schooling.

But in the 1880s and 1890s the very beginnings of the progressive era.

States started mandating that children between the ages of 6 and 16 need to be in school during the day for 9 or 10 months out of the year.

As a way to prevent them from being exploited as a child labour.

Essentially as a way to prevent.

So, it's really, it's the gilded age, children, especially children of immigrants and in the South children of free men and women are working from very, very young ages in terrible conditions in factories.

And there's a lot of angst about it.

And you could think of like Jacob Reese and the photographs and tenements but there's not really much that can be done about it.

Especially because whenever states pass child labor laws that try to regulate the employment of children, they go to the Supreme Court and this Laissez-faire Supreme Court says that interferes with the liberty of contract.

And so, all those child labor laws are declared unconstitutional.

So, there's an effort to pass an amendment to the constitution, making the regulation of child labor constitutional but that is also met with all kinds of opposition from exactly the factory forces.

So, instead progressives are like, okay, well, what we can do if we can't ban employing children, we can require children to go to school.

So we can meet the same objective and actually it's a two for because we would really like to have children get free public school.

So, that happens but then once children start to go to school by the 1910s with the emergence of kind of the study of virology and microbiology, people were like if children are all going to go to school, they need to be vaccinated.

So, then in addition to compulsory education laws, there are compulsory vaccination laws.

So, now parents who want to keep their kids at home to work on the farm, they have to send them to school and they have to get them vaccinated.

And then the way that the political opponents of universal free childhood education deal with that is by saying, look what they're teaching them, look what they're teaching your children.

You have a right as parents to keep them home, to refuse to have them vaccinated, to not send them to school and to decide what school books they will use, so this sort of.

And that is taking place a century ago?

This was a century ago and it's really the origins of our kind of modern cultural way of configuration because it's a very articulated conservative position and there's a progressive position.

And the progressive kind of the slate of progressive reforms is a lot to take in one generation.

You're used to keeping your kids at home working them on the farm and teaching them from the Bible.

And then in a year suddenly you have to send your kid to school every day, get them vaccinated and they're reading stuff that you've never even heard of before.

So, it is a really fast sweeping change and there's a big reaction against it.

One of the things I loved about the Kentucky story though is the law that was proposed in the Kentucky legislature would also affect the university and the University of Kentucky had a new and really progressive university president, Frank McVeigh is think his name.

He was this really interesting economist from Wisconsin.

Kind of kid of like progressive republicans in Wisconsin and he would not have it.

He was like I'm going to fight this because I cannot have this is before sort of our modern notions of academic freedom.

He was like, I cannot have the state legislature pass a law saying we can't teach evolution.

Like it's the basis of all the science courses that we teach.

All the biological science courses kind of require this.

And he engaged in this very clever campaign to defeat it.

As soon as he heard about the bill, he sent telegrams to like 50 people across the country who would be really influential, including members of the clergy and important philosophers and said like this is what's going to be voted on in our state.

Please send comments, collect and he had arranged in advance with newspapers across Kentucky to publish all the responses and they did and he managed to defeat the thing.

So, it's actually a really interesting political response because what he also did was he wrote an open letter to the people of Kentucky and he said, you know, evolution is not what you think it is.

It's not a conspiracy against the idea that there is a God or that you can't teach your children biblical origin stories anymore.

Like it is a theory of change and how change happens biologically.

It's not what people who are trying to defeat the teaching of evolution are telling you that it is.

So, he did this kind of big public education campaign -at the same time.

-Yeah.

And you have a beautiful quote from Will Scopes at the end to that effect basically about how she sees real beauty in the idea that God created evolution.

-And that's you know.

-Jill: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, you use the history of the country to illuminate the struggles of the present.

I mean, how much of that is a deliberate choice on your part where you're setting out to say, let's do an historical exegesis to determine what are the contours of a particular political conflict -we're having.

-Jill: Yeah.

I think that's kind of my beat as a magazine, as a contributor to the magazine.

So, something's brewing and... it's hard to know, hard to get advantage on it and it seems so consuming and there's a lot of chatter around it.

My job is to pull back from that and be like, where did this come from?

What's something that I can discover about where this comes from that might be illuminating and might shake people out of their kind of over determined positions about it.

Look at it from different angle.

We're undoubtedly reliving a lot of old controversies.

So, that clearly is one commanding impulse in your approach to your job or your multiple jobs because you're a journalist with the New Yorker, but you're also a college professor and now you're also a law professor at Harvard too, right?

So...

But there's another side that I picked up on which I would just like your comment on.

There's a kind of a, kind of subversive, a kind of classic dethroning side to you where you... there's certain people who seem to catch your eye and then you kind of go after them a little bit.

One of the people that you take down in your inimitably gentle way, but nonetheless, I think take down is a Harvard Business School professor named Clayton Christensen, who's the author of the Innovators Dilemma and is the mastermind behind the whole idea of disruption or innovative disruption.

And you kind of disassemble the whole idea and debunk it from a lot of different angles, including the business angle.

And I just wonder well, first of all, what was your intention there?

But secondly, what gives you the courage to go into somebody else's field and discipline and blow the whole thing up like that?

[audience applauding] Yeah.

And tell me if I'm reading you wrong.

No, I mean, there's a kind of crusading muck raking Jamie: Intellectual muck raking.

piece of how I approach things and it's, you know, I have enormous respect for most work than most people do.

Like, I don't love the take down.

It just makes me extremely anxious.

I have a piece recently in the New Yorker that's about Elon Musk that's pretty tough.

And he's a person who people make a lot of jokes about but is wildly indulged.

His world view is really taken for granted, but he actually world view is really derivative of disruptive innovation.

He came of age in the moment of the celebration of disruptive innovation as the new gospel that would rule capitalism worldwide.

But is also kind of the altar on which we worship the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, right?

That is the faith that they, if they do this whoo whoo and we're supposed to say that's great.

Thats another big Joe Lepore whooi I think I noted it six or seven times.

That's from Nero Wolfe.

Nero Wolfe says whooi all the time.

-So, with Clayton Christensen-- -Jamie: Yeah.

Explain the whooi to everybody about -Yeah.

-innovative disruption?

There was a... that piece is maybe 10 years old.

Maybe it's 2013, 2014.

There was a moment when I felt that I had really never heard the word disruption except to refer to my sixth grader and his behavior in class.

You know what I mean?

That's what I thought disruptive meant.

And then suddenly it was everywhere and we needed to be disruptively innovating and on campus we must disruptively innovate.

And it just seemed like a nonsense word to me.

And it's a kind of a recycling of Schumpeter's creative destruction, right?

Like you need to blow something up and set aside everything that anyone thinks they know about something, what you bring to your project is your ignorance of it.

And then you could think about it in a fresh way and in the business development model, instead of making what Christensen called sustaining innovations like tinkering around the edges of your product and making a little bit better each year for your established customers.

You should just chuck the whole thing aside and disruptively innovate, create something completely different.

That might be really junky at first, but would eventually dismantle the whole industry.

So that you might have a taxi service say and maybe you're making it a little bit better.

You have a call center, you have response time, you're doing some work to try to make your taxi service more responsive to your community.

You get better licensing requirements for your drivers or whatever, you're upgrading your cars.

These are sustaining innovations, but they're not fundamentally changing the nature of the work that you are doing.

Well, Uber is disruptively innovating.

Uber doesn't care about any of the things that you have cared about as a taxi service or let's say you're involved in public transportation.

Well, Uber is going to come along and dismantle that through disruptive innovation.

And so, Uber would say not speaking for Uber, but in my imagination, you know, things like the consequences for mass transit or traffic or pollution or wage inequality or the lack of benefits for these drivers in this new gig.

These don't matter, we're disruptively innovating.

Therefore, please give us money.

Like the concerns that actually we might think ethical businessmen and women might have, right?

With the effect of changes to an industry on a labor system on questions around environmental justice in the neighborhood or the availability of transportation to different communities.

These don't matter because you're disruptively innovating and what you bring to it is you don't care and you don't know but you can fix it.

And so, I would be at like faculty meetings and the deans would be like, we're bringing in some disruptive innovators to tell us how we can change what we do.

But they don't know anything and they don't care about anything and why would we listen to them?

My editor asked me if I would write something about the kind of cult of sudden sort of grasp of disruptive innovation.

And I was like, well, I wouldn't, why would I bother?

Nobody believes it's obviously whooi.

It's obviously just such a obviously rank -whooi -Jill: Whooi I'm trying not to curse because this is televised.

And then he's like, well, why don't you think about it?

And then that spring, the New York Times, this was actually leaked, had a disruptive innovation report.

Because the New York Times wanted to disruptively innovate because BuzzFeed News was getting a lot of traffic.

And so, I remember reading the PDF online of the disruptive innovation recommendations for the New York Times and it basically was like, Clinton Christensen has explained that disruptive innovation works this way with charts and graphs as if it's like a science.

What we need to do is become more like BuzzFeed and here's how we'll do it.

And I was like, but the New York Times, I'm going to lose the New York Times.

I was very frustrated that people in... New York Times needed to make a lot of changes, no doubt about it but to do so by taking on faith a model of change that had really no empirical foundation -Jamie: Yeah.

-was concerning.

And that's one of your big points, right?

That the overwhelming number of disruptive innovators fail and a lot of non-disruptive, non-innovators succeed.

And so, it's hard to see exactly what scientific meaning is of it.

And it has, I think you show pretty much zero predictive value about what's going to happen.

So, what is it really?

-Yeah, yeah.

-I mean.

It seems like a little bit of take down of business school academia.

I didn't say that, you said that.

I mean, I think that the...

I'm being a disruptor.

I think there are...

I mean...

So, the way the essay began or the way the writing of the essay is, it's the story of how I used to work at the Harvard Business School as a secretary.

Oh, I see where this is going.

And so, it's a little bit of like, wow, these people are paid.

I remember for the longest time all my furniture and all my apartments came from the Harvard Business School because they're always renovating the buildings and they would have like these dumpsters and I'd like borrow a car from a friend and be like, look, we could all go get desks.

Oh, look, we can all go get sofas and like everybody I knew we would just go like get all of our furniture from the dumpsters at the business school.

So, I had a jaundiced view of the Business Academy.

You're getting paid in furniture.

Getting paid only in furniture.

So, anyway, like so for the Christensen, I was genuinely clear, like, why do people believe this?

And I went back and I read the dissertation and I looked at all the case studies and then I redid the work and it just doesn't, it cannot be proven.

It's really, it has a kind of cult like quality and a lot of business school publications have a kind of like worship the guru thing.

And so, it participates in the same sort of veneration that Silicon Valley does.

And it's always like a guy in a black T shirt and a black blazer and some fun zippy little sneakers who walks out onto a dark stage and the screen pops up behind him and you're like whoo.

I just don't like that.

I don't like that.

That's clear.

Well, let's talk about some things you like.

You've got an essay on Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In it you say that trivialization is not tribute.

And you seem to think that the real meaning and the complex legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been trivialized by some of the pop deification of the late justice.

Why don't you give us your thoughts on that?

I mean, I think she is an incredible intellectual and really important constitutional thinker and defining justice.

But I think she, especially the last 10 years or so, kind of participated in that.

There are a lot of concerns about what justices do in public and where those lines are and to the degree there is such a thing as a national conversation.

Presumably we're kind of having one now.

There are no lines by the way.

Jill: Where are those lines maybe should be?

Every Justice has his own sugar daddy at this point.

[audience laughing] But every justice shouldn't be a bobble head either, right?

Like those are two sides of the same coin, right?

And so, I think some of the sort of fetishization and the celebrification of Ginsburg, the kind of like SNL, the Ginsburg, the Kate McKinnon thing.

Ginsburg is not responsible for that, but she goes on the Colbert show and does her work out and speaks in stadiums before tens of thousands of people.

I'm uncomfortable with that.

The Supreme Court justices doing those things.

That's not really what the piece that I wrote about.

The piece I wrote about Ginsburg was about how she was not a hero to feminists at the time that Clinton nominated her to the court.

And he thought the women's rights groups would oppose her.

Oppose her and he was right.

And there too, I went to the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women at Radcliffe and I read the correspondence in news-papers and they were all those papers and they did not want Ginsburg because she had given the Madison lecture earlier that year in which she regretted the argument -the majority made in row.

-Jamie: Yeah.

She had a different, as everyone people know the story.

She had a different case as an advocate for the director of the women's rights program for the ACLU.

She had a different case that she wanted to go forward to the Supreme Court and it was derailed by Roe going forward and her case was about an Air Force officer who was being forced by the Air Force to have an abortion in order to stay in the service.

And she liked that case because it was about choice, but it wasn't-wasn't fighting for the right to have an abortion.

It was fighting for the right to choose.

It would have been a better way to establish Jill: She thought it would have been a better way the constitutional right to privacy.

it would have been more durable.

It would have been an equal protection argument not a privacy argument.

And with the Dobbs decision, well, it could have gone in either direction.

I mean, it could have been a privacy case too, but in any event the Dobbs decision obliterating a woman's right to choose means that a state could compel women to have abortions or to be sterilized, which is a more historically sealing example, I guess.

Because there were tens of thousands of women who were sterilized by states, especially in Virginia in the 19th and early 20th century.

Well, there's a lot of politics in the book and you're a political person clearly, but you also have like a strong whimsical side.

And one of my favorite essays in here is the one you did about Robert Ripley in Believe It or Not.

And what one of your colleagues at the New Yorker wrote about Robert Ripley's Believe It or Not.

There was also a biography of it.

And you say, both of these writers seem to have something of a parallel obsession with the bizarre, the weird, the idiosyncratic and it seems like you've got -a little bit of that too.

-I have that too -I totally have that.

-Yeah.

What did you think about Robert Ripley?

I'm not a Ripley fan.

And he's one of these guys where the sort of indulgence of his own oddity.

And so, Robert Ripley was an actual guy.

He did Believe It or Not as a newspaper column and then a radio show and then movie shorts.

It wasn't really a TV thing.

It was really movie shorts.

And he had an auditorium on ODDI auditorium and he would collect oddities and he was like a Barnum, like collector of freaks and freakish people.

But he also collected women from around the world who were apparently, you know, there's some intimation that they were trapped in his house and they could never leave.

I mean, he was gross, like he was actually gross but then...

Believe It or Not.

[audience laughing] I'm sorry, it's actually really not that surprising -that he was gross, right?

-Jamie: Yeah.

Yeah, and then you read, there's a lot of, like, if you read 30s journalism there's the, because the New Yorker was really big on the kind of day in the life of the Dog Catcher story, right?

Where they find some sort of ordinary notes maybe not ordinary person whose life was just fascinating.

And Jeffrey Helman who wrote the profile of Ripley wrote a lot of those.

Like, here's this guy, you know, the quirky guy, he's a trash collector but let me tell you though.

And he had to let me collect the odd guy stories.

And so, it was like the odd guy collector writing about the collector of odd women and the whole thing just has a kind of unsavory quality to it.

But working on that made me think a lot about how I like to collect.

Like I have, there's a piece in here where I go to meet the guy who invented freezing the heads of dead people to bring them back in the future.

I notice that one.

That one's also, that's not, that's me participating in the very thing that I think is creepy.

So, it's my attempt to reckon with my own proclivity.

Yeah.

You're a beautiful writer.

You pay attention to the written word these essays are easily digestible.

And you write in one of the essays about the history of the novel and fiction and history.

You make the point which I'd never seen before but that the old novels used to use the word history on the cover of the books and say a history of something made up, you know?

But then you talk about the gender politics of non-fiction historical writing and fiction and how women were excluded for so long from historical writing because that was men's stuff.

It was men's fields, it was government, it was politics, it was business and so on and that fiction became a way where women could occupy cultural terrain safely and use their imaginations and so on.

And there's still traces of that today when you think about like who reads what, -who buys what and so on.

-Yeah.

I wonder where you fit into that whole taxonomy that you set forth in that essay.

Yeah, I have always been really sort of baffled by it and troubled by it.

But the essay makes the argument that in the 18th century when the novel is invented, that's why it's called the novel because it's new, it's novel.

It emerges in opposition to what is becoming a more empirical version of the history book, which is, you know, for the purposes of training young statesmen, we shall read the Lives of Great statesmen of the past.

And the novel really is about private life, domestic life at the kind of emergence of kind of middle class, domestic life of England.

And it tends to be about the private lives of women.

And then it tends to be written by women and just the two genres just really do diverge in that way.

And what gets lost, what gets jettisoned as feminine from the writing of history is anything like funny or passionate or involving sympathy or empathy, rage, or humor, private life, childbirth, miscarriages, children, like just as a whole vast realm of human experience and human expression that is forbidden in the writing of history and you see it down to our day and that like Father's Day will roll around and you can be sure there'll be some 600 page biography of patent that you can get for your dad for Father's Day through the history book club, you know?

And it will sell in the gazillions and no fathers will ever read it.

I think that's awesome.

That's what the fireplace is for the man.

Jill: That's what the mantel is for.

And not that we shouldn't reevaluate pattern every once in a while.

But that's not what I do or why.

I mean, I think myself mostly as a writer, I happen to write history.

I've tried in so many ways to see if I could sort of shake up the writing of history in that public, in that kind of Barnes and Noble book show.

What's on that mantel.

Say a word if you would then about the times that we're in and how a lot of people who were considered for their day visionary or forward thinking or progressive get taken down.

I mean, I can imagine reading your book about Ben Franklin's it's interesting this guy had a lot of money.

I mean, he was Mr. penny saved is a penny earned and industry and thrift and he wheeled all this money to Philadelphia.

They're still spending his money, you know, it pays for everything.

Did he not help his sister out?

But so, what do you do about the way that Jefferson has fallen so much in terms of American public opinion because people are reckoning with the fact that despite everything that he knew and even what he might have felt he stood with the slave system?

-Jill: Yeah.

That is a really interesting question and I have several different things to say about it and I'll try not to take too much time, but one is when I was in graduate school, we were taught, the founders didn't know that slavery was wrong.

And so, therefore we shouldn't blame them Jill: for not knowing, I know.

You went to that new college created by Governor DeSantis.

Yes.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Right.

That's what we were actually taught.

Frederick Douglas famously said, well, everybody who was enslaved knew it was wrong.

How is that hard to like?

Tom Payne new it was wrong Ben Franklin new it was wrong.

So, how I dealt with that for instance in these truths where I have to... this chapter I'm talking about the writing of the constitution and we need to learn a lot about James Madison.

Well, it happens that there's a really interesting letter that Madison writes home when he's in Philadelphia for the Continental Congress, not for the constitutional convention.

And Philadelphia, partly through the abolition society that Franklin is the president of has passed an abolition law in 1780 you cannot sell another human being in Philadelphia.

And Madison has had this guy with him, he calls him Billy, a human being that is his family's property.

And he has to go home back home to Virginia and he writes to his dad and he's like, I don't know what to do.

I can't bring Billy home because in Philadelphia, he's been free.

And when he goes home, he's going to tell everybody like what freedom is and they're just going to leave.

So, I can't bring him home and I can't sell him because that's not legal here.

And I don't really know what to do because I need some money because I want to buy Hobbes's Leviathan from a book sale.

And so, I put that story in there in the end he ends up William Gardner who was Billy stays in Philadelphia as a free man.

He ends up marrying a woman who was a laundress to Thomas Jefferson and they start a family and that is the founding story of the United States.

But just kind of put that I do there is just to put that out for the reader like he tells us like it's not like he doesn't understand all of this.

Like here freedom is contagions.

It's an infection that will spread and like he's just dealing with this in this very incomplete way.

On the other hand, when I have students come to say I can't read this book because it was written by a racist.

I mean, I've had students refuse to read the Dred Scott decision of Roger Taney.

The Supreme Court decision that basically leads to the Civil War from 1857 that is required reading in courses and I believe should be.

Well, he would agree with DeSantis and those guys because they say you shouldn't be able to teach the doctrine that one race is superior to another.

So, you can't teach the Dred Scott decision.

Jill: That's right.

-You can't teach most of American history.

But there are progressive students who would say you also can't.

-They don't want to read it.

-They don't want to read it.

It's traumatizing.

So, you know.

That's the same rationale that the right wingers have too where they say it hurts the feelings of the white kids.

I don't see why the white kids have to identify with justice point.

I think it's a really interesting point that a lot of these objections participate in the same set of ideas about what challenging ideas do and how.

So, what I say to students not necessarily specifically about Dred Scott.

This has come up with like reading Homer and I say, you know what Homer didn't do?

He didn't use any fossil fuels his whole life.

And what have you done today?

How did you get to my campus?

How did you get to campus today?

Where is the electricity coming from?

Like if you want to think about like the thing that you will be held accountable, that we will be held accountable for, we are destroying the actual planet and to sit around and say, like I can't read Homer because I don't like his views on women is really to have lost all proportion.

-Jamie: Yeah.

-So, or to say we can't name a school after Thomas.

People do whatever.

The local school board should make their decisions I'm not trying to, but to say that we are blameless for moral failings is just to misunderstand the nature of the human condition.

Like, yes, Madison knew how wrong that was and he did not stop it.

And people drove to this auditorium this evening in cars that are run by oil and we understand how bad that is and we still do it.

And some of them walked and took the bus.

Jill: And some of them walked and took the bus.

Like it actually, I think like you kind of...

I mean, I was always taught as a kid you begin with yourself.

And if you really are so virtuous in the universe that you can't be tainted by reading the works of people who in their lifetime made moral compromises.

-Jamie: Yeah.

-Then I don't have anything to teach you.

Let's talk about... [audience applauding] Let's talk about guns and gun violence in the second amendment.

A lot of my colleagues in Congress are absolutely convinced and insist that the purpose of the second amendment is to give the people the right to overthrow the government.

Which is why we can't ban the sale of the AR-15s and other weapons of war on the streets of America.

It's why we cannot have a universal violent criminal background check.

This argument which adopts the NRA orthodoxy on it now suggests that the purpose of the second amendment is to give the people an arsenal at least equal to or greater than that of the government.

So, that if the government turns tyrannical, the people can engage in insurrection against the government.

I think whooi might not be strong enough.

Jamies: Yeah.

[audience laughing] Well, when we get in these debates, you know, I give a legalistic rebuttal to it.

I say, well, article one section eight of the constitution gives Congress the power to call forth the militias of the States in order to repel invasions and suppress insurrections.

The Republican guarantee clause says that Congress must guarantee the people of the States a Republican form of government, not a Republican party form of government, but a representative form of government and must assist the States in suppressing domestic violence.

Section three of the 14th amendment says that if you've served in office, you've sworn an oath to uphold and defend the constitution against enemies, foreign and domestic and you violate the oath by engaging in insurrection or rebellion you shall never be allowed to hold federal or state office again.

Okay.

So, the language of the constitution completely demolishes the argument that somehow the second amendment in invisible ink creates a right to overthrow the government.

But what as an historian do you say to that argument which is blockading us from passing the most simple common sense reforms that are completely consistent with the second amendment as spelled out by Justice Scalia in Heller versus District of Columbia.

What do you say to it?

I mean, I think the history is entirely as dispositive as a constitutional argument, right?

It's not weaker than it is in addition to, right?

So, there are a few things that one could point to but one is the second amendment used to be called the Lost Amendment because it was never cited or used by anybody for any purpose whatsoever because it was just understood within the States and in municipalities that if you, you know, you could have some gun safety regulations and states and municipalities over the country always did.

And the only time that the, you know, it's not until 1939 in Miller versus US that there is any claim that the second amendment involves an individual right to bear arms.

It's up until 1939 it is really just-- -Jamie: Militia based.

-It is just understood as like that you have a right to have a militia and that the way you pass the sentence, you can go back to Madison's or the original phrasing or whatever like it's a 9 to 0 decision.

There is no individual right to in the case in 1939 was...

In 1934 and in 1938 congress had passed the Federal Firearms Act and the national-- As if I'm explaining something to you that you already know this is for you guys.

And the NRA by the way supported those.

And the NRA supported those and there was a challenge to it and the court is like, well, obviously the federal government has a right to pass these things.

It was basically criminalizing machine guns, which is why we don't have machine guns anymore.

So, from 1789 to 1939 nobody, it's like just not a thing.

So, what happens in 1968 when the gun control Act that's passed in response to the assassination of JFK finally gets to Congress which also the NRA supported.

You just have to recover the political history from 1968 to 2023.

And that is a very specific political history in which people on the pretty far right end of the Republican Party at that time, who are now the Republican Party decided after 1968 and certainly by 1971 that gun rights would be a great white rights issue as a kind of backlash against civil rights.

You know, there was a lot of backlash against civil rights, but the model of seeking constitutional rights through mass political movement and pressure on a court seemed to be a really good one.

So, the political idea was, we'll do that, but we'll do that for white men who are feeling aggrieved and left behind.

And so, this will be the thing that we will use.

And it's a very emotional, it's easy to kind of gin people up about it by suggesting that it's a right that's about to be taken away from you.

But in order to do that, you first have to invent the idea that it is such a right.

And so, there's just this enormous amount of work that goes on that's largely funded by the NRA, academics who get grants from the NRA to kind of come up with this, not just the individual rights argument by the 80s the insurrection argument, which is what lies behind, you know, Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City and the Michigan Militia, Jill: those militia movements of the 90s.

And January 6th.

And gets you all the way down to January 6th.

And you think about, you know, I recognize people run for office and they have a kind of I'm going to do what's necessary to win and then I'm going to do the right things.

But then you think about the moral depravity of deciding to fight for that.

To fight for the right for an armed nation to be able to stage an insurrection against a sitting democratic government.

That's your political move for generations.

-Jamie: It's pretty shocking.

-It's pretty shocking.

I mean, when I point all this stuff out to them, they come back with two things.

One, they say, what about Patrick Henry?

He said, live free or die.

Which was like an 18th century bumper sticker, right?

And he was an anti-federalist who voted against the constitution.

So, it would be like turning to Robert E Lee to ask him for his views on the 14th amendment or something, you know?

So, and then they say, well, what about the American Revolution itself?

The declaration of Independence, which does say absolutely when in the course of human events, if the government has turned tyrannical after a long train of abuses and usurpation and so on.

Yeah, but Jefferson never cited British Law or the non existent British Constitution or the Magna Carta.

He said as a matter of natural law and natural right, people can overthrow a government that turns tyrannical.

So, if you think that the 2020 presidential election, which Trump's Department of Homeland Security said was the most secure presidential election in American history.

If you think that that was an exercise in tyranny akin to King George and what was happening against the communists, then you can come and you can attack our officers and you can bloody the police and send everybody to the hospital and try to overthrow the election of the government.

But if we catch you and we arrest you and we give you due process and the presumption of innocence and a jury of your peers finds that you're guilty.

Like Stewart Rhodes, the Yale law school graduate, head of the oath keepers, you're going to prison with hundreds of others of them.

And that's where you belong if you want to overthrow our government.

We don't have the only constitution on earth which gives you a right to destroy the constitution.

[audience applauding] The other thing I would say about that is, and what I would say to your pro insurrection colleagues is the triumph of the constitutional convention was actually article five.

It was the ability to amend the constitution, which was understood to be the alternative to insurrection.

And when they sat around and they were like what are we going to do about it when things need to change?

We have to have something that people can do short of insurrection.

Or else the only way to change the government will be insurrection, which obviously nobody should be doing that.

So, you know what we should have, we should have an amendment provision.

And the fact that that's broken is its own problem, Jill: but they didn't break it.

They built it to be used.

That's exactly the point that Lincoln made too.

I mean, Lincoln said, you can try to change things through elections and if that doesn't work, you can amend the constitution.

But he said insurrection is a violation of the first principle of government, which is the people get to choose our leaders, -not a mob that shows up -Jill: Not the mob.

-and declares itself a militia.

- Right.

And by the way, it's very clear from the constitution that the officers of militia are appointed by the state and the Congress can regulate and organize the militias and call them.

So, the Proud Boys and those keepers, they are not a militia, no matter what they say.

That is not the militia and militias don't show up in kindergartens with AR-15s.

[audience applauding] I can't believe we're almost out of time here Jill Lepore.

I could go on for hours with you, but I've got to talk about your final essay which takes issue somewhat with the report of the January 6th select committee.

The distinguished January 6th.

-Jamie: Yes, -Right.

and nobody is safe from the critical eye of Jill Lepore.

I actually agreed with some of what you said in the essay.

But your basic point is that it's very legalistic, it's very defined and focused in time to the months leading up to January 6th.

The election, the manufacture of the big lie, a phrase that you don't like and the mobilization of propaganda to undermine the election and then the various assaults through the state legislatures, election officials like Brad Raffensperger, the hit on Vice President Pence to try to get him to step outside of his constitutional role just to anoint Trump the victor and so on.

But you say that it's limited, it's narrow, it's way too focused and I took you to be saying that we didn't deal with the larger historical forces that were in motion and we didn't deal with.

And here, I'm agreeing with you a lot of the larger forces that were present on that day, like white supremacy, like the domestic violent extremist groups, like Christian white nationalism which was present, like the influence of this new social media and what all of that meant.

And there was about maybe one person on the committee that wanted to do all that stuff and you can guess who it was.

That was me and but the others felt like that that would direct attention away from the central culpability of Donald Trump, which I absolutely agree with.

I mean, as a juridical matter, he was the one who set all of these events into motion leading up to what took place on January 6th.

In fact, the right wing groups that had obtained permits from the National Park Service had gotten them for January the 20th.

They wanted a counter protest against the inauguration and it was Trump who got in touch with them and said, no, you've got to change it to January 6th.

Jamie: This thing is not over yet, you know, be there will be wild.

I mean, this all spun out of his imagination and I could see that maybe we didn't want to confuse the picture by talking about the role that social media played in the dissemination of propaganda or the role that social media played as an organizing tool for the people who were deploying forces around the capital and so on.

But obviously that left you dissatisfied as a historian or as a citizen customer of what we did in the committee.

But I'm just wondering if at that point, we've just arrived at a hard place of distinction between what we can get away with in public life and what we can do, what we can focus on versus what historians do.

And maybe it's more a challenge to you to pick up the baton and you write a history about what happened on January 6th.

-Yeah, fair enough.

-Jamie: Yeah.

I mean, I will say when that report was going to be about to come out, it was quite clear that people would be, the press would receive it, I think would be very welcoming of the incredibly specific bill of indictments essentially against Donald Trump.

And the hearings had revealed so much and I watched every second of the televised hearings and was vastly edified and shocked and fascinated.

And what the investigation uncovered is, of course, crucially important to the ongoing now justice department and other investigations and indictments that are well under way.

So, it's not that I disagree with doing all of those things.

I think my job because I'm not just writing the, like, I'm not the New York Times op-ed columnist who's going to say the report came out and look at all these cool things that are really interesting, but you didn't know we should really prosecute Donald Trump.

My job is to say, as a historian, what is this thing?

What is this 800 page document?

Because the independent commission that I would have liked to see that I think you would have liked to see was not authorized, there were not the votes republicans oppose that.

They advocated it and then they opposed it when Donald Trump changed his mind about it.

Well, you have to do what he says -whenever he says it.

-You do.

Even so now.

That's a principle of critical thinking.

He's just a guy, he's just one of those guys you really like.

So, my questions were what would the commission rep-- like if you think about the 9/11 commission report, which is a very different kind of report or the Warren Commission report or FDR commission report on the attack on Pearl Harbor.

There are different kinds of findings.

There's a political chemistry in each of those.

I mean, the 9/11 commission arguably pulled some punches about Saudi Arabia's role in the whole thing.

So, I mean, what was frustrating to me as a reader...

I'm edified to understand the mechanism by which this thing happened, how these people came, who did what, what moved there, you know, the rook the castle five, the queen, the king, the bishop, whatever.

Like if this happened, I'm glad that now I see the game, the play of game.

Almost half the country still believes the election was stolen, like, why do they believe?

Why?

Until we can answer that question, I'm really worried about what happens next.

That's not the committee's brief, right?

That's the historian's brief.

So, when do we find out why?

And I want to know the answer.

So, that was my disappointment.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to have to wait for some more historical analysis to get it all out there.

Jamie: But we all play our part and nobody plays a more noble or beautiful part in understanding America today and America in the past and the world than Jill Lepore.

Thank you for writing this awesome book.

Thanks.

[audience applauding] Thanks to the Kentucky Author Forum.

Thank you University of Louisville and thanks to the great people of Kentucky.