The History Wars and America at 250, with the Historian Jill Lepore
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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Guess what? The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is nearly upon us.
And to think about this occasion, and what it means, I've asked Jill Lepore to join us. Jill's been a staff writer at The New Yorker for many years, and just this month, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book We the People, A History of the U.S. Constitution. Jill Lepore is a professor of history and law at Harvard University, and she's our host for today's program.
Way back in the 1930s, in the dark days of the Great Depression, with democracy on the rocks, the US government hired more than 6,000 out of work writers for something called the Federal Writers Project. They brought on all kinds of writers, from newspaper reporters to playwrights, anybody. who used to make some kind of a living by writing and couldn't anymore. Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Zorneil Hurston, John Sheever, Richard Wright, they all got involved. Studs Turkle, too.
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