Jill Lepore Keeps Helping Me Refine My Perspective on America

The thing I’ve always hated about American History is the incidences of cruelty. I’ve never wanted to spend much time reading about Andrew Jackson because there was so much cruelty then. I always have two or three books going at the same time and one of them is Jill Lepore’s one volume American History. I’m a Mayflower descendant(for all that’s worth) and my relatives all may have their place in the barbarism (John Brown caused a lot of deaths at Harpers Ferry and he clearly didn’t have all his marbles). We all celebrate Columbus Day and many seem to think it’s part of American History (When Columbus landed on Hispaniola there were 3,000,000 people. 50years later there were  500. )These are truths Lepore brings out. She says we just might as well start with 1492 because “the Nation’s founding truths were forged in a crucible of violence, the products of staggering cruelty and slaughter.”
In my mind I can see Trump as a cruel slaveholder with a whip. It would be easy for him because he only cares about himself. This is not a man who could write “Amazing Grace.”