"American History Is Messier and More Complicated than We May Prefer"

"'All nations are places,' she writes in her stylish new collection, 'but they are also acts of imagination. Who has a part in a nation's story, like who can become a citizen and who has a right to vote, isn't foreordained, or even stable. The story's plot, like the nation's borders and the nature of its electorate, is always shifting.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Julia M. Klein reviews Jill Lepore's The Story of America: Essays on Origins.