Jill Lepore, the author of “These Truths: A History of the United States,” outside the Widener Library at Harvard, where she is a professor.Credit Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times.

[Jill Lepore, Harvard professor, has just published “These Truths,” a new history of the United States.]

If “These Truths” ends on a note of “Gibbonesque foreboding,” as she put it, she hopes it will take us out of the frenzy of the present and provide perspective, if not necessarily comfort.

“Yes, the internet is disruptive of democracy, but this has happened before,” she said. “You shouldn’t stop worrying. But here’s a way to be a more informed worrier.”

(Jennifer Schuessler, “Jill Lepore on Writing the Story of America (In 1,000 Pages or Less)” NYTimes, 9-17-18)

[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)