American History Hit - What Made America: The Constitution & The Franklins

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

We've asked some of our favorite historians for their number one moment from these 250 years of the United States' History. For this episode, we're honored to welcome Jill Lepore back to the show.How do the life and letters of Jane Franklin, beloved sister of THE Benjamin Franklin, reflect the nature and constitution of America?You can read more about this in Jill's book THESE TRUTHS: A History of the United States, the Jubilee Edition of which is out now.Jill is a Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker.Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Once, 250 years ago, people traveled as fast as a horse could run or a ship could sail. News took weeks to cross oceans. Only candlelight pushed back the darkness.

Then gradually, or suddenly, everything changed. Steam and later diesel engines powered factories, locomotives, ocean liners. Automobiles replaced carriages. Electricity illuminated the night. medicines and vaccines extended lives as telephones, computers, and the internet connected the world. Human beings finally left Earth's atmosphere and rocketed to the moon. Through all that time, with so much change, a nation born in the age of sail was growing. Back in 1776, few would have wagered that 13 rebellious colonies,

would somehow grow into a continental power that could dominate world affairs. But the United States was always more than a risky bet. It was an idea, an experiment in self-government, hatched on the eastern edge of a very rich continent. 250 years on, empires have risen and fallen. Human rights have made clawing progress around the globe. And still, the American experiment, has endured and evolved, encompassing so much of what makes this nation what it is.

Don Wildman here, and this is American History Head, and today, in the spirit of America's 250th anniversary, the semi-quincennial, we've polled a few of our past guests, all esteemed voices, asking this, please tell us one of your most inspiring, uplifting, meaningful moments of America's founding era. To our great good fortune, we were answered by none other than Professor Jill Lapoor of Harvard University, staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, prolific author of so many important works, most recently, We the People, which just won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in history. Professor Jill Lepore, Jill, honored again. Thanks for taking our request. Sure, happy 250th, man. Yeah, exactly. I'm feeling it. It's a month out right now.

Your response to our 250 query concerns an individual named Jane Franklin McComb, lived 1712 to 1794, born in Boston, Massachusetts, or that area, to the Franklin family, her big brother, Benjamin Franklin. This good woman struck a chord for you. She had a front row seat to the whole revolution and its aftermath, and you wrote a biography entitled The Book of Ages. What is it about Jane Franklin McCom that drew you down this path? Some years ago, God, it was a while ago.

I was assigned, the New Yorker wanted me to write an essay about Benjamin Franklin for some reason. Maybe there was a new biography of him or anything. I have a very immersive research style. So I went to the library. Yale University Library for decades has been working on printing the complete edited papers of Benjamin Franklin. It's, I don't know, it's maybe 60 volumes or something. You know, most people would search it online, but I don't like to search for stuff

online. Like, I want to read the complete letters of this person. He was a writer, you know? So I spent days just pulling volume after volume off to the shelf and sitting on the floor and reading through them. And I was like, who is this Jane Franklin that he keeps writing to it? And it turns out that Franklin wrote more letters to his sister Jane than he wrote to anyone. And their correspondence is the fullest in terms of spanning the whole of his lifetime of any

correspondence. And I was fascinated by my utter lack of familiarity with her. Yeah. The great historian Carl Van Doren wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Franklin, and I think he had been so overwhelmed by Jane that he later wrote a little book about the pair of them in their relationship. He published an edited volume of just her version, her half of the correspondence.

I think he just felt like he had let Benjamin Franklin down by not being able to really include the story. So I decided to write a book about her. And in a way, you know, Franklin, one of his many aphorisms as poor Richard, this kind of fictional character in which he published Proverbs, was one half the world, doesn't know how the other half lives. And really was kind of the philosophy

of my biography of Jane, right, and it really wasn't a way about her, right? Franklin's whole story and his autobiography is the story of America as kind of the rise from poverty to wealth and reputation, from ignorance to knowledge, from, you know, from poverty to prosperity, from a kind of, he was an apprentice who was indentured for that kind of unfreatom to freedom. But Jane's story involved none of those transformation. Her life was a life of rags to rags. Interesting. Franklin was one of 10 sons. He had seven sisters. She was one of them. She's about six years younger than him, I believe. He was born in 1706. She comes along in 1712. They were Benny and Jenny. I mean, they were very close, weren't they? Yeah, so he was the youngest boy and she was the youngest girl. And they were often compared. There was something twin like, you know, in certain families, there's certainly with 17 kids. You could imagine, there's likenesses and differences. And they were kids who were really alike, spirited, lively, curious. And he, I think, had a particular affection for her as the most vulnerable person in their family. And when he himself was himself very poorly schooled, Franklin really only had two years of formal schooling.

Not that unusual. They came from a fairly poor family. Their father boiled soap for a living. They all helped boil soap for a living. His brothers went into the trades. And, you know, his sisters all got married and had many, many children. and those of them who survived. But Franklin was so bright that they sought a little bit of an education for him two years.

And there was a theory that he might go to Harvard College, which, of course, was just training ministers. And Josiah Franklin, their father said he thought he ought to pledge a tithe of his sons, one-tenth of his sons to the church. But Franklin really had no interest in the church. But what was unusual then is that he taught Jenny how to read and write. And most girls, we forget how uncommon it was for girls to get any education, certainly poor girls, to get any education at all. It's just one of the things are so striking about the course of her life that she's able to have this correspondence with her brother.

And in a way for a historian, what a window that is on the experience of most women, which would have been entirely undocumented in the historical record in any meaningful way. So she provides this real, you know, I often think of women's history is sort of like it's, it's a dark room. And sometimes there's a candle. And Benjamin Franklin was the candle that allows us to see the life of his sister. She was evident throughout his whole life in all of his papers. He wrote more letters to her than anyone else, as you've said. She thought of him as her second self. So they had very different lives.

It was really extraordinary. As a guy, I grew up with four sisters, so I kind of understand this. By the way, my middle name is Franklin as well. And I'm named for Benjamin Franklin. There's all kinds of these things. And I grew up on Franklin Street. There you go. I read your article.

A lot of Americans, yeah, have that. Interesting. I was born on March 27th, which is the day that Jane is very close to this, thanks to you. Yeah, yeah. She never learned to spell, which we're going to talk about in a moment. The letter that we're about to talk through here is just classic. I mean, it's just bad spelling everywhere. And yet her intelligence and her wit and I would say grace comes through this writing. Yeah.

So remember spelling was not. standardized in the 18th century. So it's only a real tiny minority of very learned people that spell in a standard way. And a lot of that standardization had to do with the printing trades. And of course, Benjamin Franklin famously worked as a printer for his working life before he retired from business to serve the public. But actually, one of the things I'll just say, I love about Benjamin Franklin is how funny he is. And Jane can be quite funny too in a very different way. But when people try to read like even 18th century printing, it's very difficult. because the S's are rendered.

They look more like Fs to us if they're in the middle of the word. If they're at the end of the world, they look like an S. And there was a big movement to get rid of that because people, even readers at the time found that hard. And Franklin said that would be like cutting off a nose. How would you recognize the face anymore? He was really opposed to that change. But so, but she never learned to spell.

Of course, he did. He became a printer. And printers did have a standardized form of spelling that they adhered to. But she was an incredibly. avid reader. And a big part of their relationship, she spent her life in Boston, of course, he spent his life either in Philadelphia or in London. And a big part of their relationship was him sending her books to read. Interesting. She marries at 15 years and four months to a 22-year-old, older than her, hence the name McCom at the end of hers, her married name. The rest of the family

married around the average age of 24. She would have 12 children nursed their parents in her old age. She was very present in this family. I'm sure a huge amount of responsibility and everybody turned to her. But a lot of personality, which I'm sort of pushing towards this letter that I've mentioned. But I want to say one thing that this is a good chance to tell anyone who's younger than me. It's important to write letters. And this is a good example. I mean, we live in the age of emails. I have no idea how our story is going to be told when everything is going out on email, which is so not interesting and designed to be forgotten pretty much. much. Ben and her are lifelong correspondence, as we said, and there's a telling letter that you found. You brought this up to us. So I'm going to throw it to you. So it's from Jane McCom. It's an unpublished letter that you found in your research dated July 21st, 1786. So we're long after the revolution here. Not long after, but a few years. I'm going to throw it to you to read what you think is important in these early paragraphs because it's further down that we've really got the body of the point here. But take it away.

Yeah. And let me just set this up a little bit. Okay. So they are near the end of their life at 1786. Franklin's going to die four years later. And Jane will die a few years after that. She has raised 12 children and has buried 11 of them. She's raised her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren because her daughters

and granddaughters keep dying in childbirth. She has been among the great sufferers of the Revolutionary War. She had to flee Boston during the siege of. Boston. Her brother went up to Boston to get her to bring her to Philadelphia. She spent much of the war living with him in the safety of his house in Philadelphia. She wanted to go home and he bought her house in the North End and it was her great pride and joy. She was right, lived in this little brick house. It still stands right next to the old North Church. Wow, really? Especially in her very old age when she no longer had children in the house,

which really she didn't have that experience until into her 70s. She became even more devoted to reading. And he would send her quite sophisticated books of political philosophy. She had also, in the 1770s, she ran a boarding house for the Sons of Liberty and members of the Massachusetts Assembly. So she listened to every meaningful political conversation that took place during the resistance movement in the revolution. She witnessed the war. Her sons fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill. So now we are 10 years after American independence, it's a big anniversary, right? We're celebrating the They were celebrating the 10th. Mm-hmm.

And so she takes up her pen, this old woman in this little brick house in the North End, living alone, really kind of in a Virginia Wolfray with a room of her own for the first time in her life. Right. And writing to her brother in Philadelphia, her esteemed, aged, the most respected, most famous American in the world, Benjamin Franklin, to report on the July 4th celebrations in Boston and on her recent reading. So I'll just read a bit of this to give you a flavor of it. And then I want, there's a single paragraph I'd like to talk about. Dear brother, you've given me good pleasure in the short account you have wrote concerning my grandson,

for you not to perceive that he wants either advice or reproof is a good character. But I perceive you have some expectations of the loss of your advice and flatter myself, I am one. So really just family news. I'm glad you have received the soap and like it. she she she knew the recipe for the family soap and when franklin was living in paris he asked her all the time to send her the soap because he liked he he was swaning around paris and but he liked to be pretending to be the rube the american rustic and he would show the franklin family soap which was quite rough and primitive to his bonifides that he was a real working class man i perceive you have kept

the fourth of july very honorably as well as joyfully we also observed as usual But we had so lately celebrated the opening of the bridge on the Charles River being a new thing that the other was not so much noticed in our papers. In other words, they had a big July 4th celebration, but you could picture the first new bridge across the Charles was really dramatic story in Boston. Anyway, so she's writing along. She reports on the Harvard graduation ceremony. And now we get to the point where she's talking about a letter that she has received.

Yeah. I believe Josiah is quite a proficient in your new. mode of spelling. He has written me a letter that I believe perfectly right. I can read it very well, but dare not attempt to write it. So this is a new spelling scheme that Franklin is trying to begin the process of standardizing spelling. And he sent Jane his new alphabet for simplified spelling, which was a scheme that never really took off, Benjamin Franklin's simplified spelling. And so she's saying, you know, great, that's really interesting, but I couldn't possibly write in this new simplified sentence. I have such a poor faculty at making letters. And he had sent a Jew.

Anyway, so she then this is this paragraph where she's, she's talking about her reading, and she's referring to a book by Dr. Richard Price, who was an English radical, and supporter of the American Revolution. Dr. Price thinks thousands of Boyles, Clarks, and Newtons have probably been lost to the world and lived and died in ignorance and meanness merely for want of being placed in favorable situations and enjoying proper advantages. Very few we know have been able to be. able to beat through all impediments and arrive to any great degree of superiority in understanding. So thousands of Boyle's and Newton's like Richard Robert Boyle, the chemist, right, who comes up with Boyle's law. So she'd read this treatise by Price and she's really kind of

essentially copying it out where Price is, you know, these are people who live in a world with, you know, there's been a king, right? There's a royal family there. If you're born as, if you're born as a tradesman, you live your life as a tradesman, if you're born poor, you live your life, poor, if you're born rich, you inhabit everything, that they've lived in a world of incredible hierarchy and almost no social mobility. And Benjamin Franklin is extraordinary for the social mobility that he has achieved. And he thinks that is the promise of the new nation, that you could be born into poverty and you could rise. And she's read this tract and she's thinking about what this political philosopher has said, which is that there are geniuses out there who have been

lost to the world and lived and died in ignorance and poverty merely for want of being placed in favorable situations. That is to say, yes, it's great that we live in a country where maybe you can actually crawl your way out of poverty, but so many more can't that the condition in which you are born can be such a trap. It can be such a prison. And there can be brilliant people who live in poverty, who just never. achieve anything. And was this part of a regular dialogue of theirs over this sort of philosophy?

Yeah, they have these really amazing, I mean, they require a lot of inspection and reconstruction. I spent years, years making a list of every book that I knew Jane Franklin to have read. It's I published as an appendix to this biography I wrote of her Book of Ages. And I even found some of her copies of books that he had sent to her in this little town library in Massachusetts. It blew my mind to hold in my hand her copies and you could see where she had written in the margins, like how this woman born, you know, who had no education whatsoever had imbibed the revolutionary idea that we are all born equal in talents, like that we should have opportunities to pursue an education, to rise from ignorance and poverty. We are, we should be

be born free, that this, we, we are endowed with equal rights. These are, these are ideas that she, historians often ask, like, okay, was the revolution just really a revolution of elites, like a bunch of property owners and slave owners really just trying to, they didn't like that, they didn't want to pay taxes, how did it really affect ordinary people? Did ordinary people really believe in those? They did. Like her least heartfelt letters are about what it means. She didn't necessarily accrue the benefits of the ideals of the revolution, but her children and grandchildren did, and she knew that they would. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

It's a book that's called Four Dissertations, and I looked into it a little bit, written by Richard Price, as you say, a Welsh clergyman. So this guy's from over there, any political radical. And there are a series of these dissertations, and the first one's called On Providence, an objection to the idea that everything in life is faded by providence, which is so interesting. You know, we're dealing with the aristocracy over there. There's a sense that you are going to be who you are throughout your life. This is really speaking to the idea of an American ideal that we can move upwards. And that was very much in the air before the revolution, during and after.

People were really coping with that idea of social mobility, right? Yeah. And it's hard for us even to recover how radical an idea that we're, was in the 18th century, right? You are, you are born to what you are born to, you are to the man are born, or you are not to the man are born. And it was the American sensibility and that challenged that, but very much with the support of radical thinkers around the world, Franklin, Benjamin Franklin was quite good friends with Richard Price. And another thing that happens in 1787, not long after this letter, yeah, a lot of places, I grew up on Franklin Street, And a lot of places in the United States are named, of course, Franklin or Washington, Columbus, whatever.

But Franklin was somewhat uncomfortable at this because it had kind of the tinge of nobility about it. Right. And so the people of the town of Franklin wrote to him and they asked him, you know, for a gift. I think they wanted to, you know, get some money for him, put up a statute, him, whatever. And he's like, you know what? I will send you a list of books that you should put in a public library. I would like there to be a public library in this town. So this is, again, before there are public libraries, which are a huge part of opening a

up the doors of opportunity to people that don't have an education, right? Franklin had started the first private library that was open in Philadelphia in the 1730s. He's so committed to education. So he writes to two people to ask what books should be on my list for this town. They're naming after me. He writes to Richard Price and he writes to his sister Jane. And they send back suggestions. Like what are books that an American town, a new town should have? Which I just think is really It's so refreshing. Yeah, it's refreshing. It's un-cynical.

It speaks exactly what you're saying. There's so many people that take one view of this. And indeed, Americans everywhere were really struggling with what was this revolution about? And what did they fought for? How do we ground this experience that we've just gone through and the struggle that's continuing? Jane was drilling down into that ground. You also speak about her in a later book that you wrote called These Truths, 2018, less of a biography, more of an idea of. of her that places her in this new nation.

These truths really treats her more emblematically, if I may. No matter how much she's included in the revolution, she's still excluded from society. And this is really the crux of the issue as an idea. In this country, we are constantly faced with the remarkable ideals that were set out right from the beginning in the most famous documents. And yet the reality was always different, that there was this gap between the two.

And that's a lot of what you've worked with in your career. Am I right? Yeah, and I think, you know, you see the consequences maybe of really the costs of living within a myth of the country's history when we're living in an extraordinarily painful moment economically where those of us with kids have real concern that our kids won't do as well as we were able to do. You know, I did a lot better than my parents did. You know, my grandparents were immigrants. There had been, you know, my grandmother was an Italian peasant who never learned how to read. She never learned how to speak English. My father went to college on the GI Bill and became a school teacher, and I'm a professor.

Like, you can trace this, you know, my, think of my husband. His grandfather was a blacksmith. His father became a physicist, and he's a computer scientist. Like, there's a nice kind of you could see a sort of trajectory. There's nothing wrong with being a blacksmith. Nothing wrong being a school. Like, but in terms of economic opportunity, right? And that, that doesn't seem to be continuing.

Right. And we're looking at a real economic crisis. So it's useful to be reminded of how hard fought economic opportunity has been, how hard fought the idea of social equality has been, of racial equality, of welcoming of immigrants, of the things that have characterized much of American history have been contentious throughout. So I write about Jane in this book, These Truths, which is a thousand-page history of the country. It's just people with many, many, many, many characters that you might not know about. There's a lot in the book about Benjamin Franklin, but for my purposes, it's also useful to remind readers, he was extraordinary.

It was actually extremely unlikely that anyone really would rise from his kind of poverty to his kind of reputation. And he's one of the world's most important thinkers in the 18th century. It's an extraordinary journey. But there's also something to be learned from the ordinary journeys. Yeah. But this gap, if you turn this on its head, it's not the negative that so many imagine. How could a Declaration of Independence that claims all men are created equal be written by a slave owner? That's always the one that gets pulled out, correctly so, as the hypocrisy that's built in and baked into that document.

Well, that's true in many, many different arenas of American society at that time and throughout our entire history. But this is a chance to say, gee, isn't that interesting that that gap always exists and it closes and it opens and it closes and it opens throughout. It becomes kind of this engine, this tension that is built into the American system, into the American thinking that's different from a lot of other places in the world. Am I saying this right? I mean, I think the infrastructure that fuels the economy changes over time. There's nothing continuous about economic development for the course of American history, right? So, unsurprisingly, the economic opportunities for generations changed. They change with the conditions of, you know, is it, are you a farmer in Vermont

in the 1830s farming sheep and you're doing okay? Well, then there's the Mexican-American War and the United States acquires half, the northern half of Mexico, and there's all this new cheap land for white settlers who are going to move into that land. And everybody in Vermont leaves their sheep and leaves their farms and Vermont becomes extremely poor. And there's a lot of great shepherding going on in the southwestern country. The railroad changes everyone's economic opportunities. The factory, the telegraph system, you know, mass industry with the Ford system in the beginning of the assembly line. What unions do to provide economic opportunity is a story of much of the 20th century. The GI Bill has these extraordinary consequences.

But as you say, they're not all stories of expansion. And if anything, one of the things that's really tough in trying to take a long view of American history at just this moment is that income inequality, which is quite measurable, certainly since 1913 is when the federal income tax is first assessed after the 16th Amendment makes it possible for Congress to tax incomes. And what's good about that, I mean, from a historian's point of view is then we have tax records, federal tax records. So you can look at incomes from 1913 forward. And the discrepancy of income inequality or the measurement of income inequality is a really important tool for understanding economic opportunity and economic mobility across American history. And income inequality is extremely high at that point. That's, you know, the gilded age, right? where they're the great robber barons,

and they're just incredibly impoverished, especially immigrants, like when I think my Italian grandparents came, and they were certainly better off in the United States than they were as peasants in Italy, but they lived grindingly poor lives. And the real fuel that the Second World War on the GI Bill is, you see income inequality just plummet.

So there's just really not a huge gap between the rich and the poor, kind of, you know, the late 1940s through the 1970s, there are plenty of poverty, no doubt. Sure. But the gap nationally is not that high, but since the early 1970s, income inequality has been steadily rising in the United States. So we're back to sort of where we were in the Gilded Age.

Well, it's the economic determinist view, you know, that this is being driven by that. What I love about Jane Franklin and about your book is how it places the ideas of this country in the forefront. And someone like her and Benjamin Franklin were very well versed in talking. and talking about the identity of being American in a different way than it was. And it was a really fascinating feeling. So I'm clinging to this notion as we go along here. When you turn to slavery, it is the ultimate hypocrisy.

All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happening is up, except if you're not white and male. In 1776, there are over half a million enslaved souls in the United States with a total population. of 2.5 million, 20% of the population. The declaration did not free anyone in 1776 like that. Jefferson tried to remove the passage that condemned the British king for slave trade, but he was forced not to by slave holding interests in the south and the north. Nonetheless, as I say earlier, it's there. You know, it sits there as this glowing phrase, all men are created equal. And it can't be defeated, you know, no matter how much

much hypocrisy is involved, it continues onward. And that seems uniquely American. I'm sure there's equivalence in other countries, certainly in France, but it's really baked into our system, isn't it? Trying to cope with these ideas that seem to fall short in the reality of our lives and yet fighting for a better way. So I think one thing we tend to forget about the Declaration of Independence is that it's not that it's a plagiarized document, but Jefferson always said it was really simply an expression of the American mind. It was meant to distill in quite beautiful prose. No shade on Jefferson.

He said what he said better than anyone else had said it. But the ideas that the Declaration of Independence expressed were ideas that Americans had been expressing for quite a long time. And more immediately, earlier in 1776, in the first state constitutions, which preceded the Declaration of Independence and, including, you know, Virginia's Declaration of Rights, which was in June of 1776, Pennsylvania's Constitutional Convention in May. And so the idea that all men are born free and equal was one that Americans had been putting down on pieces of parchment all that year. And, you know, or in common sense Thomas Pampel from January 1776. And those ideas are also found and arguably have real roots in petitions submitted by enslaved black men to state legislatures seeking their freedom.

So, you know, in 1773, 1774, you find these petitions in the Massachusetts Archives that black men in Boston sent to the legislature some other states as well saying, all men are endowed with certain inalienable and national rights, and they are including the right to be free. And under those terms, it's unconstitutional that you hold us in slavery. And therefore we petition you to free us. And those ideas find expression in the Declaration of Independence, but then the execution that would have ended slavery, which would have been so much easier in 1776 than it became

later on. Because although there are a large number of enslaved people, they're not that many compared to what they would be after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. So I think it's important that we recognize how influential were the voices of of enslaved people in articulating that these ideas are what the new nation is founded on, what the new state constitutions are founded on. So even, you know, Massachusetts Constitution from 1780 says, it's written by John Adams, all men are born free.

In 1783, a woman in Massachusetts who's held as a slave file suit. It says, according to the Constitution, we're all born free. Therefore, I can't be held as a slave by this person who claims to own me. And she wins. And that's the end of slavery in Massachusetts. So I think it's really important to know the struggle that you're talking about precedes the Declaration of Independence. And it is immediately acted upon by people seeking their freedom under its terms. Frederick Douglass, he cherished the Declaration's principle of liberty and equality.

He also questioned the United States supporting independence movements abroad, but refused to grant those same freedoms to African Americans. His famous speech in Rochester, New York, July 5th, 1852, what to the American slave is your 4th of July? I mean, yeah, there are people like him just dealing with the complexity of and absurdity of the situation. You can't escape the words and yet actions speak louder. That's the reality of America all the time. Your work deals with the historical weight and responsibility of those truths carrying forth. And so we celebrate while at the same time understanding the tremendous cost of that argument,

the price paid by so many that continue to work, trying to close that gap up. One of the things that I think we sometimes overlook as the crucial contribution of the abolitionist movement and black abolitionists in particular, like Douglas, like the woman who sued for her freedom in Massachusetts in 1783, is that it is they who constitutionalize the Declaration of Independence. Americans often think we hold these truths to be self-evident, is in the constitution. It's not. The Constitution is written in 1787. But the Declaration of Independence, in effect, becomes part of the Constitution because of what abolitionists do, making it part of the Constitution. You know, I work in schools these days. I'm part of National History Day. I'm on the board of that. And it is something that I say often to kids is that it's one thing to celebrate the Declaration of Independence, but 11 years later is the 250th of the U.S. Constitution. So we are in the midst of now entering into an incredibly important founding era, you know, a celebration of a founding era that lasts more than a decade. And every year, another 250th anniversary of everything is going on. But it all culminates in, in 37 with the U.S. Constitution. I don't remember the 200th anniversary of the Constitution in

what was that, 1987. It just went by me because I was in my 20s. But boy, that's the one to really focus on, isn't it? Yeah, I write about the 1987 moment a lot in my book, We the People, because it actually was a really important moment in the history of American constitutionalism. So your listeners will have to go buy the book. There you go. Great honor to talk to you, Jill. Thank you so much. I hope we see you again. Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper, 41 professor of American History at Harvard University, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, bestselling author of works we've discussed these truths and the Book of Ages, right up to this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History, We the People. Run, don't walk. Get these books. Thank you so much,

Jill. Such a pleasure again. Thanks so much and have a great fourth. Yeah, happy 250. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes. Two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.