Lisa Brennan-Jobs on the Shadow of Steve Jobs, and Jill Lepore on the Long Sweep of American History

Summary

---

The New Yorker Radio Hour

Episode: “Lisa Brennan-Jobs on the Shadow of Steve Jobs, and Jill Lepore on the Long Sweep of American History”

Date: September 21, 2018
Host: David Remnick

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, David Remnick explores two deeply personal and resonant stories:

• First, he speaks with Lisa Brennan-Jobs about her memoir, Small Fry, which recounts her complicated relationship with her father, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and her mother, Chrisann Brennan. The conversation delves into family, memory, and the burden of legacy.
• Later, Remnick interviews Harvard historian and New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore. They cover Lepore’s monumental new book, These Truths: A History of the United States, discussing how power, protest, and the struggle over who counts as American have shaped the nation.

---

Part 1: Lisa Brennan-Jobs on Family, Absence, and Memoir

Theme:

The emotional, psychological, and practical ramifications of growing up as the child of a famous—and largely absent—parent.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

• Opening with Theft and Agency (01:15):
  Lisa Brennan-Jobs reads from her memoir’s opening, describing how she began “to steal things from [her] father's house” shortly before his death—a metaphor for grasping for pieces of him, agency, and perhaps narrative control.

  “After stealing each item, I felt sated. I promised myself this would be the last time. But soon the urge to take something else would arrive again, like thirst.” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs (01:15)

• Why This Story, and Why Now?
  Brennan-Jobs explains her initial resistance to writing about her father’s legacy; she wished her “first book had been about something, anything else” (00:09), wanting her story to be her own, not overshadowed by Steve Jobs.

  “Am I allowed to write my own story when I have such a famous father?” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs (01:59)

• Eviction and Displacement
  Brennan-Jobs moved 13 times before the age of seven (03:00). She and her mother lived near poverty, even while Jobs amassed wealth and fame.

• On Being Forced to Write the Memoir
  The story demanded to be told before she could move on: “There’s a story maybe that has to come out first that then opens the way for other stories.... I was hoping my father would be incredibly dull on the page.” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs (03:53)

• Struggles with Depiction and Public Ownership of Steve Jobs
  Brennan-Jobs discusses reconciling her private pain with the public’s image:

  “Maybe another way to put it is that everyone's complex family is unique. No matter who it is.” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs (12:39)

• Cruelty, Rejection, and Limited Support
  Remnick notes periods of “real cruelty,” with Jobs denying paternity and providing little support. Brennan-Jobs frames this as emotional unreadiness rather than pure financial neglect:

  “I don't think it was a money question… he wasn't ready to be a father. My parents were both very young when I was born.” (07:05) “It was so close, the way often only children and their parents are, and then made closer by the fact that we didn't have money.” (06:19)

• Reconciliation and the “Hollywood Moment” (10:07)
  Brennan-Jobs recounts Jobs’s tearful apologies on his deathbed, his cryptic “I owe you one,” and the strange catharsis that came too late.

  “If we could do it again, then maybe next time we could be friends... But also I meant not your daughter, please, next time.” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs (10:23)

• Inheritance, Fame, and Universality
  When Remnick asks about her inheritance (implied: emotionally), Brennan-Jobs worries about being asked about money but affirms that the legacy is far more complex. She stresses that the longing for connection is universal, not unique to children of the famous.

  “Isn't there sometimes a longing for people who are even around? Isn't there sometimes a multiplicity of feelings for people you love?” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs (11:59)

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “It's like the fantasy of control.” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs on writing memoir and processing trauma (05:04)
• “There are moments of joy, tenderness, sweetness, care in this book between the two of us that are nowhere else.” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs on showing a fuller spectrum of her relationship with Jobs (09:15)

---

Part 2: Jill Lepore on the Sweep of American History

Theme:

What does it mean to tell—honestly and comprehensively—the story of America? Who counts, and how do we handle the nation’s contradictions and traumas?

Key Discussion Points and Insights

• Ambition of ‘These Truths’ (14:46)
  Lepore has written a single-volume history spanning 1492 to the present, driven partly by her publisher’s challenge and a historian’s sense of responsibility:

  “I wish there was a book like that. And I decided someone should try.” — Jill Lepore (15:06)

• Foundation on Violence and Powerlessness
  Lepore squarely faces America’s founding atrocities: colonization, slavery, displacement of Native Americans.

  “It is actually the assassination of worlds. It is that slaughter, those atrocities, that enslavement, that profound loss and suffering that is a crucible of violence that makes possible the ideas on which this nation is founded...” — Jill Lepore (15:51) “These ideas are actually made possible by the protests made by the powerless during that world of violence.” — Jill Lepore (16:17)

• Immigration in American History
  Discussing present-day debates, Lepore notes that most of American history upheld open borders, and restrictionists have a tenuous legacy:

  “Open borders are the most scandalous thing in American history. No, they're not. They're actually the founding ideal.” — Jill Lepore (18:58)

• Forgotten Moral Crusaders: Mary E. Lease (19:11)
  Lepore profiles Mary Lease, a 19th-century populist, suffragist, and later, a controversial white supremacist—showing how moral crusades shaped U.S. politics and how their legacies are ambiguous.

  “She comes out of that crusade... and then it turns into prohibitionism. By now, the moral crusade is just a great big giant wrench in the American political campaign toolbox.” — Jill Lepore (21:41)

• The Free Press and Early America
  Lepore, an expert in communication history, notes that American democracy presupposed an informed citizenry, making a free press uniquely important and contentious from the start.

  “They need to have some way to receive ideas other than just the educated gentlemen writing letters to one another.” — Jill Lepore (23:17)

• Presidents and the Press
  Remnick asks if vilifying the media is new; Lepore says antagonism is old, but so is belief in rigorous debate:

  “It's not that [Jefferson] thought that the press was to be believed all the time, but he knew it was essential.” — Jill Lepore (23:58)

• Comparing Today’s Turbulence to the Past (25:01)
  Asked if the national mood has ever been more anxious, Lepore responds with the historian’s long view:

  “There is no day before the Emancipation Proclamation that isn't worse than today... But if we want to think about the past as all of our pasts, then I think we need to have some sense of proportion.” — Jill Lepore (25:01)

• Progress: Myth or Reality?
  The narrative of relentless progress is, Lepore argues, more ideological than true:

  “I guess I think that notion of the forward progression itself is the illusion... I don't actually think it represents the real patterns to be discerned in American past.” — Jill Lepore (27:08)

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “I give a lot of causal weight to slave insurrection, runaways, enslaved people who run away, wives and servants who flee, to apprentices who run away, to native peoples who wage wars or in other ways resist the taking of their lands.” — Jill Lepore (16:10)
• “For most of American history, open borders are the ideal—restriction is the exception, not the rule.” (paraphrased from 18:58)
• “There is no day before the Emancipation Proclamation that isn't worse than today. Not a single day in all of those centuries.” — Jill Lepore (25:01)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Lisa Brennan-Jobs on Memoir and Agency — 01:15 to 12:45
• Jill Lepore on American History — 14:46 to 28:09

---

Final Thoughts

This episode powerfully juxtaposes the personal and the collective: Brennan-Jobs’s search for selfhood against the gravitational pull of a public legacy, and Lepore’s insistence that national myths must account for both triumph and trauma. Both interviews emphasize complexity—of family, memory, nationhood, and public narratives—inviting listeners to consider the hidden facets behind the familiar stories we think we know.

Transcript

[Narrator]

From one World Trade center in Manhattan. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.

[David Remnick]

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Lisa Brennan Jobs has written a book called Small Fry, and in many ways it's a memoir with a pretty familiar theme. The Absent Parent, in her case, about a father who for years rejected and even denied their relationship and his duties. When Brennan Jobs was a child, she and her mother, a very young mother, lived near the poverty line. Even as that father, Steve Jobs, was becoming a king of Silicon Valley. Lisa Brennan Jobs has avoided cooperating with writers portraying Steve Jobs. Biographers, profile writers. She wanted to tell her own story, with all its pain and after many years, a reconciliation. She's published her memoir to largely excellent reviews. But she told me there's still the lingering feeling that she wished her first book had been about something, anything else, so that it could be completely her story and not the story of the man whose legacy we're all carrying around in our pockets. I asked her to read from the book's introduction.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

Three months before he died, I began to steal things from my father's house. I wandered around barefoot and slipped objects into my pockets. I took blush toothpaste, two chipped finger bowls in celadon blue, a bottle of nail polish, a pair of worn patent leather ballet slippers, and four faded white pillowcases the color of old teeth. After stealing each item, I felt sated. I promised myself that this would be the last time. But soon the urge to take something else would arrive again, like thirst.

[David Remnick]

Now you begin this book in the way that you do. Why?

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

I guess it makes me an active participant in the book. One thing that happened when I started writing is I was disappearing in the pages. I was writing about my parents and different things that had happened and I couldn't. Other people who read it said, I can't quite locate you. And I think there was a feeling of like, am I actually. Am I allowed to write my own story when I have such a famous father?

[David Remnick]

What are the implications of that? What does that mean?

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

I knew it was going to be taken in a direction. I knew I was writing a coming of age story about a girl, but that it was going to be twisted into the story of a famous man. I wanted to write a coming of age story about a girl growing up in California in the 80s and 90s because I felt like there was. It was a universal story. So we were moving a lot and looking for homes.

[David Remnick]

You moved some incredible Number of times was it again?

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

Yeah, it was 13 times before I was seven.

[David Remnick]

Right.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

And there was also. Even in the homes, I was in a. A search for a feeling of belonging and being inside and being impossible to push out. Yes. One of the homes was a mansion. Yes. Like, he's so famous. But it doesn't change the fact that we were searching for that. I was searching for a home, and I was hoping. I was hoping that I would have inspiration to write another book first so that perhaps that would dull or numb the fact that I have someone so famous in this family I'm writing about.

[David Remnick]

And why didn't you write a first book about stories?

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

But this one kept on coming up, and I think a lot of novelists.

[David Remnick]

Coming up, meaning what?

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

Coming up to be expressed. There were stories that kept on, oh, gosh, I got.

[David Remnick]

You had to do it.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

I had to. And I think this is common. I think this is common even with novelists, where there's a story maybe that has to come out first that then opens the way for other stories. And I felt like that. And also I was hoping. Then the second thing I was hoping is I was hoping that my father would be, like, incredibly dull on the page.

[David Remnick]

I'm afraid that didn't happen.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

And then it didn't happen. He was interesting. And I was like, oh, gosh, he's gonna steal my thunder. No.

[David Remnick]

Steve Jobs is the father, often the missing father, the father that rejects you for a long time. Much later, it invites you in. There are moments of real cruelty, some of it mindless, some of it you ascribe to immaturity on his part. But it's tough. It's really tough. And what was that like to re. Experience every day over your desk?

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

So this is what I was thinking. You have this thing with memoir where you're going back and you're writing about it again, and you're pulled back into these feelings and. And these times. But at the end of the day, I got to put down the pen and then go back to my life. I mean, it's like the fantasy of control, Right.

[David Remnick]

It's mastery of the past.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

Right. So I got to go back and live in the past and elongate the good moments and maybe even elongate the bad moments to really figure out what they meant to me and suffer through them. But I still had control over them, ultimately, and I had perspective control. I could see them from the point of view of an adult and. And a child. I guess that was the purpose of.

[David Remnick]

It for a long, long Period of time. You certainly had no relationship to your father. No acknowledgement from a father. To what degree was he spoken of at home with your mother?

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

How there were so many discoveries that I made when I was writing the book. Right. One of the discoveries was how my mother had left this space open for him to come back. She'd known him since they were both very young and she knew who he was. And so there was a. You don't forget that. You don't forget when you know someone who they are. And so she wasn't doing it in some sort of strategic way. Oh, you know, I don't want to turn Lisa against her father. She just genuinely did not want to turn me against my father because she knew that deep down he cared about me.

[David Remnick]

He was not exactly generous in the early years in terms of providing for you.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

No, he was absent in the early years. Mostly my relationship was with my mother, and that was so intense, you know, it was so close, the way often only children and their parents are, and then made closer by the fact that we didn't have money. So we were, like, bound together, you.

[David Remnick]

Know, us against the world.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

Yeah, it was a bit us against the world. And I think. And then, I mean, now I have a child and I just think of how, you know, she had to walk to the laundromat to wash the cloth diapers when they were dirty. You know, one set, she was like, oh, my gosh.

[David Remnick]

And worse and far worse. But how do you make sense of why couldn't he have helped more? I mean, people get split up, they get divorced, but very often they do for each other what they can.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

Oh, I don't think it was a money question. You know, it was emotional. I think he wasn't ready to be a father. My parents were both very young when I was born.

[David Remnick]

How old?

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

And 23. And they were. And I was not planned for her. And perhaps he was angry about my arrival, so he wasn't around. And I feel there's some credit due that he came back. You know, I think that was hard. What got him back, I don't know. But my mother said something like when his work life was not doing as well, you know, because at that point he'd been kicked out of Apple. And I think that left an opening for him to look around and notice that we were around. And then he put some effort into getting to know me, really true effort. And I think it was probably a pretty courageous thing because he. I don't think he really knew how to be around a Kid.

[David Remnick]

So the Steve Jobs that comes out of popular imagination. You get the sense of a visionary, a certain kind of genius, a really difficult, difficult guy at times. Cruel, self centered moments of kindness, I guess. But they're eclipsed by the other stuff. Most often he's gone. This book is accomplished. How do you see him?

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

I have so many answers to that. The way that you just read he came off was from the other things that you read, not from my book.

[David Remnick]

Absolutely.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

So I'm curious how mine is different from those for you.

[David Remnick]

Because it's a book about you.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

Right. I thought so too.

[Jill Lepore]

About you.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

Yeah. And how does he come off differently?

[David Remnick]

Well, there are moments where I want.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

To hit him more than before.

[David Remnick]

Well, because it's coming from a kid who's palpable on the page.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

Right. So it's like. It's not necessarily a different character that I'm describing. It's just that it's visceral.

[David Remnick]

Now, I think that's fair.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

I've tried to understand why this reaction has been strong because I feel like he's been so well covered and that there are moments of joy, tenderness, sweetness, care in this book between the two of us that are nowhere else. Right.

[David Remnick]

Well, maybe it's because people feel a certain sense of. It's very strange to me in a certain way, relationship and ownership to this guy who's now been dead for a while because he's in their pockets, he's on their desks. It's a very odd thing. People feel they have ownership. And here you come into the world the daughter who has been treated badly or rejected and forgotten in the early years. And then this very complicated reconciliation and relationship develops. And there's even on his deathbed. Maybe you should tell us about what happened when he was very sick.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

Yeah. So we kind of had a Hollywood moment. I went back to see him before he died and he was. He was apologizing fiercely for a weekend and crying and it was. And saying, I owe you one. I owe you one. Which seemed like such an odd phrase.

[David Remnick]

What is?

[Jill Lepore]

I don't know.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

I didn't know how to make sense of it really. I said to him, if we could do it again, then maybe next time we could be friends because we liked each other. We would laugh together. It was fun when we were friends. But also. Also I meant not your daughter, please, next time.

[Jill Lepore]

That was hard.

[David Remnick]

Yeah.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

And he was saying the same thing. God, it was hard. It was so hard.

[David Remnick]

It wasn't too little too late.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

No. Well, it may have been. And it was. I don't want to sound it's hard to say it was too little, too late because it's been so glorious that it happened. Right. But, yeah, it was cathartic. But it was also hard to be in the moment at the time. I remember thinking, okay, I guess I'll need to save this for later. Like many of these memories, you kind of are confused and you box them up. But I think the process of writing the book was that unboxing, maybe a last question.

[David Remnick]

And it's about this, about inheritance. What do you have of your mothers and what of your father's and in what ways?

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

Oh, God, I was so worried you were going to ask me about money.

[David Remnick]

No, I mean, I mean it in a much different sense. Yeah.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

What do I have of my like.

[David Remnick]

Was there too little of him to derive enough of him? The book is about this in some sense, not getting enough of someone.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

And I think, I think sometimes the famous guy is a little distracting just.

[David Remnick]

Because the famous guy in the corner.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

Over there, the famous guy in the corner over there wearing the black mock turtleneck because don't other people feel this way about the complicated figures in their own lives? Like, isn't there sometimes a longing for people who are even around? Isn't there sometimes a multiplicity of feelings for people who you love? I imagine other people have similar feelings, even though, you know, my father was so famous. Or maybe another way to put it is that everyone's complex family is unique.

[David Remnick]

No matter who it is.

[Lisa Brennan Jobs]

No matter who it is.

[David Remnick]

LISA Brennan Jobs. Her new memoir is called Small Fry. Ahead this hour, I'll talk with Jill Lepore about American history. Her new book takes in absolutely all of it, and we're going to talk about some of the important bits. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. For one extraordinary weekend, the New Yorker assembles more than 50 events featuring some of today's most prominent writers, artists, filmmakers, actors, comedians, musicians, politicians and activists. Don't miss it. October 5 through 7. Explore the free full festival lineup and buy tickets [e-mail] festival. That's newyorker.com festival. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. DAVID I'm David Remnick. In our political climate, arguments about the past are absolutely everywhere. Look at the turmoil over Confederate monuments or on the limits to immigration. Think about the president's call that we should make America great again, versus the progressive view that we are always somehow trying to make America better. Jill Lepore has been writing for the New Yorker about our current Political struggles, but always with the long view of a historian. And in her day job, when she's not writing pieces for us. Jill's a professor of history at Harvard University, and in a brand new book called these Truths, she's tackled the entire American story. And it's a remarkable undertaking. Jill, let me start with the obvious. You've decided to do a survey of over 600 years of American history from 1492 to last week.

[Jill Lepore]

The obvious, but the inexplicable.

[David Remnick]

Well, that's it. That's it. What possessed you? Why did you tackle something so ultimately expansive?

[Jill Lepore]

Partly, I really can't turn down a dare. This is a bad thing to confess. A B.

[David Remnick]

What was the dare? Who dared you?

[Jill Lepore]

Norton, the publisher. Then I really, really, really thought, damn, I wish there was a book like that. And I decided someone should try.

[David Remnick]

Well, this book, which is filled with all kinds of triumphs and achievements and all the rest, but it opens with some really grim statistics. And you write, between 1500 and 1800, roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas, and they carried 12 million Africans there by force. And as many as 50 million Native Americans died chiefly of disease. And so I suppose it illustrates one of the unfortunate realities of history, which is that most of the people affected by major events have much of a choice in them. How has powerlessness informed the study of America and the story of America?

[Jill Lepore]

What I argue, and this is actually something I came to believe on, again, like kind of freshly reading, the evidence, was that it is actually the assassination of worlds. It is that slaughter, those atrocities, that enslavement, that profound loss and suffering that is a crucible of violence that makes possible the ideas on which this nation is founded, as horrible as that, is the beauty of the idea that all humans are equal, that we are born with inalienably with natural rights, that the people are sovereign and they give their consent to be governed. These ideas are actually made possible by the protests made by the powerless during that in the numbers that you cite there. So I give a lot of causal weight to slave insurrection, runaways, enslaved people who run away, wives and servants who flee, to apprentices who run away, to native peoples who wage wars or in other ways resist the taking of their lands. That it is that sort of the ceaseless question in the ferment of that violent, that world of violence where people just keep saying again and again and again, by what right have you taken my labor and my life and my freedom? And it's that conversation that sparks all this political thought that makes possible, say, American independence. And that doesn't make American independence less magnificent in terms of the power of those political ideas. Their origins are darker and more complicated. But then I think one reason that's useful to think about is then we all have ancestors in that story.

[David Remnick]

A lot of what the book is about is about who counts, who counts as an American. And when you look at the contemporary headlines, say, about immigration, whether it's detention centers for kids or mass deportations or what's colloquially called the Muslim travel ban, how does that all fit into the American story that you're telling?

[Jill Lepore]

I think immigration restrictionists cannot find a lot of support for their position in the record of the American past. Their political forebears do not come out well in any fair assessment of the seeking of freedom and justice and equality in a democratic society in the American past. In. And I come out differently on that question than I do say about fundamentalism, with which I gained a lot of sympathy here, not being a fundamentalist myself. The immigration restrictionists have a very uncomfortable legacy to wrestle with. Importantly, there are no federal laws restricting immigration until the 1880s. I mean, fully a century after the founding of the country, you can just come into the country like, open borders are the most scandalous thing in American history. No, they're not. They're actually the founding ideal.

[David Remnick]

Jill, one of the figures you write about is a woman named Mary E. Lees, a woman I'd never heard about before. And you say that she helped bring the moral crusade into American politics. Who was she and how did she do that?

[Jill Lepore]

Yeah, she's pretty fascinating person. So she was a Kansas farmer. She was a farmer's wife. She had, I don't know, six kids. I think most of them died. She There was like, sod farmers in Kansas lost everything in the depression of 1873, as so many Americans did. Gave herself basically a college education by reading stuff that she pasted to the wall that she could read while she was doing chores. She eventually, you know, she studied the law. She ran for office. She eventually became a journalist and worked for Joseph Pulitzer. But she was probably the most famous speaker on the populist speaker circuit before William Jennings Bryan, the great populist demagogue of the late 19th and early 20th century. She, like many poor farmers in places like Kansas and Nebraska, looked at the economic development and the half after the Civil War and said, this is just a conspiracy of the government and railroad companies. They've declared corporations to be people, and they're giving corporations all these benefits. And poor farmers can't make a living, and the people have lost all their political power. And one of the ways she thought that could be remedied was by getting women the right to vote. And we tend not to pay much attention to how much populism was aligned with a certain strain of suffrage in the 19th century. She was very tall, so people always describe her as an Amazon. And I love her because she said. She said, man is man, but woman is superwoman. She had this great 19th century idea about women's superiority. She's just very, very interesting and she's compelling. She was anti Semitic. She ended up writing this kind of crazy, insane manifesto about white supremacy at the end of her life. She's much discredited character for many, many reasons, but you can't just, like, scratch her off. So she, she comes out of that crusade that come that abolitionism is a female crusade. Temperance is a female crusade. Woman suffrage is a female crusade. Populism becomes a female crusade, and then it turns into prohibitionism. What happens after women get the right to vote? They don't need to crusade anymore. But by now, the crusade, the moral crusade, is just a great big giant wrench in the American political campaign toolbox. And so other people like, oh, I'll use that. So Joe McCarthy wages a moral crusade. Barry Goldwater wages a moral crusade. Ronald Reagan's campaign was a moral crusade. It becomes the kind of go to tool of conservatism.

[David Remnick]

Is Donald Trump a moral crusade?

[Jill Lepore]

No, no, I wouldn't think so, no. No. But he uses the language of a moral crusade. And he. I mean, that's one of the many perplexing things about that campaign. But he is anointed by people who are associated with the moral crusade. Phyllis Schlafly, like her last political act, the very, very end of her life in 2016, is to endorse Donald Trump.

[David Remnick]

That's actually Phyllis Schlafly, the great anti feminist.

[Jill Lepore]

The great anti feminist who stopped the ERA. Yeah. She supports McCarthy. She supports Goldwater. She's right out of the Mary Lees playbook.

[David Remnick]

One of the things that took me by surprise, although I know you've been obsessed with it in pieces including for the New Yorker, is the presence of the media in this book. What is it about early America that made a free press so important? And it's enshrined in the First Amendment, and it's right up there with the freedom of religion. What did that press in early America look like? And how is it radically different from anywhere else in Europe, for example?

[Jill Lepore]

Yeah. So this is to the extent that I have a specialty as a scholar. It really is the history of how we communicate politically. The idea of the freedom of speech and freedom of press has a 17th and 18th century, early 18th century history that really influences our Bill of Rights. But there is also a very particular cast on those ideas that the founders of the republic make note of. They don't really see, have no idea where it's going, but they do understand that if people are going to be able to vote for their representatives who will make the laws, that the people need to have enough information to cast informed ballots. And for the people to have enough information to cast informed ballots in this country that is actually quite big and by 18th century standards, just vast, huge, sprawling, monstrous. They need to have some way to receive ideas other than just the educated gentlemen writing letters to one another.

[David Remnick]

What was the relationship between leaders and the press early on? Is there any precedent to a president calling us us, meaning the press in public, the enemy of the people? Was there that kind of attack or vituperation?

[Jill Lepore]

You know, we know what things Andrew Jackson said privately, but the presidents all got pissed off at the press. This is the famous thing of Jefferson saying maybe 1804, every newspaper should be divided into four truths, lies, improbabilities and impossibilities. It's not that he thought that the press was to be believed all the time, but he knew that it was essential that there, this is what he says, you know, in his first inaugural address, that we are all Federalists, we're all Republicans, and what we agree on is that there ought to be a contest of opinion and that the truth will be found by truth and error. Having a battle on, on a fair field.

[David Remnick]

I can't help but ask, has the national mood ever been this anxious? Obviously during the Second World War, in times of great emergency, there's a different feeling among the people. But this sense of chaos, this sense of every day is going to bring some crazy piece of news. Is it comparable to anything in your mind?

[Jill Lepore]

So I guess the first corrective I always offer when I'm asked that question is, whose past are you talking about? Like if we are talking about the American history and all of the American past and meaning everybody. There is no day before the Emancipation Proclamation that isn't worse than today. Not a single day in all of those centuries. To be born as human chattel and die as human chattel is a worse political state of affairs than the fact that our politicians scream at one another and should never be holding office in the first place, this is a bad day. But if we want to think about the past as all of our pasts, then I think we need to have some sense of proportion. That's not to say we shouldn't be doing everything possible to make the world better now, but I'm just saying, like.

[David Remnick]

That'S totally fair, Jill, and of course you're right. But does that give you. Does that calm you down as a citizen, as a human being?

[Jill Lepore]

You know what I think kind of did this for a lot of people who've been trying to sort of say, well, you know, there's been some bad stuff before was the detention of babies and toddlers this summer, undocumented immigrants. That. That in the long epic of the American story, that's not worse than Japanese imprisonment during the Second World War. That's pretty much up there with lynching. That is as great a moral travesty and atrocity as anything done in the name of the American people at any point in our history. And so it's hard to look at that and say this is an okay time.

[David Remnick]

Well, there seems to be a push and pull constantly in this history between the forces of forward movement or seeming forward movement and the forces of persistence and regression. So is there always in the course of American history, the illusion that you can leave something entirely behind or something has been entirely overcome?

[Jill Lepore]

I guess I think that notion of the forward progression itself is the illusion. And I don't mean that in a cynical sense. I mean it in the sense that it's quite important to one side of the argument to believe that the direction that the country is going into is sort of forward in time towards. In this kind of march of progress. And then it's quite important to the other side in the political argument often to say that the best times are in the past, and we need to return to those, you know, the sort of change we can believe in versus make America great again. That just at the simplistic slogan term, we're talking about moving into the future versus turning to the past. And yet, as ideologically useful as that has been for narrow partisan political battles, I don't actually think it represents the real patterns to be discerned in American past.

[David Remnick]

Jill, I just can't help but say this. First of all, thank you. And I just can't recommend these truths highly enough. It's the most extraordinary, all in one volume of American history that I could imagine and certainly that I've ever read and want to thank you.

[Jill Lepore]

Thank you, David.

[David Remnick]

The title of Jill Lepore's book is these A History of the United States. You can find more than a decade of her writing for the magazine, from originalism on the Supreme Court to the history of Wonder [e-mail] that's our show for the week. I hope you enjoyed it. Keep in touch with us on Twitter. New Yorker Radio I'm David Remnick. See you next time.

[Narrator]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Toon Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Botin, Abe Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill Deboff, Calalia Kelly, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix and Stephen Valentino, with help from Emily Mann, Johnny, Vince Evans and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.