Jill Lepore has written a thoughtful and passionate defense of her vision of American patriotism as a purified liberalism. But interventionism can be nationalist, too. Her attempt to disentangle good American patriotism from bad American nationalism.tangles American history in knots. In contrast, Lepore’s critique of illiberal identity politics is so brief it is easily overlooked.
She does a public service by drawing her readers to Frederick Douglass’s 'Composite Nation' address of 1869. Lepore makes this familiar material fresh with her attention to Native American nations. Much of the book is devoted to describing how nonwhites and disfavored European immigrant groups in previous generations were excluded by illiberal nationalists both from the polity and from mainstream accounts of American history.
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