Jill Lepore's Critically Important Journalistic Examinations of American History

In the 1930s, Democracy in America Almost Died. In the late 1940s, politics became a cynical business. In the 2010s, dystopias became extraordinarily popular

New Yorker journalist and Harvard Professor Jill Lepore is one of America’s finest public historians. In three New Yorker articles, she tackled the decline of democracies, the rise of dystopian fiction, and how politics became a very cynical but profitable business.

In one article, she recounted the last time democracy almost died in America and around t…