The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History - Hardcover

Winner of the 2011 Gold Medal in History, Independent Publisher Book Awards
One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2011
Winner of the 2010 Bronze Medal Book of the Year Award in History, ForeWord Reviews

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice for 2010
One of U.S. News & World Report's (online version) Top Debate Worthy Books of the Year for 2010
A Boston Authors Club Annual Awards Highly Recommended Book for 2011
Honorable Mention for the 2010 PROSE Award in U.S. History, Association of American Publishers
"Jill Lepore, a historian of the American Revolution and a staff writer at The New Yorker, has written a brief but valuable book, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History, which combines her own interviews with Tea Partiers (mostly from her home state, Massachusetts) and her deep knowledge of the founders and of their view of the Constitution."--Alan Brinkley, New York Times Book Review

"Throughout her book Lepore's implicit question remains always: Don't these Tea Party people realize how silly they are? They don't understand history; they need to learn that time moves forward. 'We cannot go back to the eighteenth century,' she says, 'and the Founding Fathers are not, in fact, here with us today.'"--Gordon S. Wood, New York Review of Books

"Tackling the present, the near present, and the far-away past in one small volume, Lepore has not only penned an indictment of the Tea Party's crimes against history, she's also working in the tradition of Hofstadter, helping edge the academy closer to the public arena. And remaining a card-carrying historian, churning out intricate studies like New York Burning, Lepore has continued to step outside the safe boundaries of the ivory tower. At the risk of being accused of dilettantism, she's even tried her hand at historical fiction, co-authoring Blindspot in 2008. Now she's given journalism a go, making the case that Lepore is a better reporter than any historian, and a better historian than any reporter."--Samuel P. Jacobs, Daily Beast

"The Whites of Their Eyes isn't a screed of any kind, and the text is refreshingly free of ire. It is, instead, a warning shot across the bow. To tea-party activists of today, Ms. Lepore seems to be saying, 'Tighten up your game.' In its current iteration, the tea-party is a feat of storytelling. But in order to gain a foothold in American politics, it must aspire to more than that."--Molly Young, Economist.com

"Lepore's graceful grasp of both history and reality is important. 'The past haunts us all,' Lepore writes. 'But time moves forward, not backward. Chronology is like gravity. Nothing falls up. We cannot go back to the eighteenth century, and the Founding Fathers are not, in fact, here with us today.'"--Martin F. Nolan, San Francisco Chronicle

"For a number of years, the author has been contributing pieces to the New Yorker on American colonial history, pithy commentaries shaped by historical evidence and a storyteller's hand. Here she braids those essays together, which makes them more satisfying and meaningful than if they were merely collected in an anthology. . . . The author is not smug in her treatment of the Tea Partiers, but she refuses to allow them to kidnap and torture history so that it is reduced to fit their fundamentalist mold. . . . Learned, lively and shrewd."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"In The Whites of Their Eyes, Lepore reviews the history of the American Revolution--in order to explore, and explode, the way the 21st-century Right uses that history. She criticizes history-according-to-the-Tea-Party on two levels. First, and unsurprisingly, she finds that the Tea Party's description of the past is simply incorrect at many turns. More interesting is Lepore's second criticism. In their asking the (unanswerable) question, 'What would the Founders do?', the Tea Party invites people to have a very strange relationship with the past: 'People who ask what the founders would do quite commonly declare that they know, they know, they just know what the founders would do, and, mostly, it comes to this: if only they could see us now, they would be rolling over in their graves. . . . We have failed to obey their sacred texts, holy writ,' Lepore writes provocatively. 'That's not history. It's not civil religion, the faith in democracy that binds Americans together. It's not originalism or even constitutionalism. That's fundamentalism.'"--Lauren Winner, Books & Culture

"The Whites of Their Eyes is a fascinating attempt to raise the level of US public policy debate. It is also a critique of the uses of history in politics and a brief, informative account of the ordinary people who lived at the time of the American Revolution. [It] is a valuable contribution to current discussions of public policy and should be read by anyone interested in serious political debate."--John Michael Senger, ForeWord Reviews

"In The Whites of Their Eyes, Lepore's liberal perspective is obvious although she largely sticks to history. Readers will find no exposé of an 'astroturf' movement funded by billionaire libertarians. What they will find is a trenchant, lively and devastating meditation on the uses and abuses of American history, most recently by the tea partiers. . . . Lepore counters what she assails as 'historical fundamentalism' (which, in the words of a chapter title, places 'the past upon its throne') with rich, if roaming, portraits of an American Revolution that she clearly loves. Thus, the book will have enduring value beyond the upcoming election."--Steven P. Miller, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Jill Lepore is a national treasure. There is no other writer so at home both as a trenchant scholar of American history and as an on-the-scene observer of our present-day follies. She etches the connection between past and present with a wisdom, grace, and sparkle that makes this book even harder to put down--if that's possible--than her previous work."--Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

"No one writes about our Revolutionary history and its effects upon the shape of our culture and society today with more wit, verve, and sparkling intelligence than Jill Lepore. The Whites of Their Eyes offers the most compelling look we have so far at who we were and who we have become as a nation, and provides a cool and much needed context for the heated rhetoric of this 'new' reactionary moment."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

"The Whites of Their Eyes shows Jill Lepore at her remarkable best--accessible, authoritative, and wise."--Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

"Modern Tea Partiers have thrown facts overboard and recast the Revolution in their own image: white, Christian, and ultraconservative. Lepore demolishes the Tea Party's founding fable with deep scholarship and devastating wit."--Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic

"The Whites of Their Eyes offers a lesson in what history actually is and how it seems constantly to be used and abused. Lepore is a superb writer."--Eric Foner, author of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

"This book gives an informed account of the ways contemporary references to the Revolution ignore, distort, run roughshod over, yet somehow attempt seriously to evoke the events of the past. It nicely represents Lepore's distinctive genius as a historian."--Jack N. Rakove, author of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution