Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. One of the nation’s leading public historians, Lepore has written extensively on American politics, democracy, constitutionalism, and the evolution of national identity. In 2026, her book “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution,” which examines the contested history of the Constitution and inclusion, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History. Lepore’s next book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” will be published in the summer of 2026.
The Harvard Political Review sat down with Lepore to discuss the upcoming 250th anniversary of American independence, the legacy of the Constitution, lessons from past commemorations, and the challenges facing democracy today.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: The Bicentennial in 1976 is sometimes remembered as a moment of national unity after Watergate and Vietnam. Now, the 250th is arriving amid polarization and declining trust in both politics and the media. What does that contrast tell us about American civic life?
Jill Lepore: I’m going to contest the question. I don’t think that characterization of the Bicentennial is right.
The Bicentennial was extraordinarily contentious. It came at a difficult moment in American history. Lyndon Johnson established a Bicentennial Commission in 1965 as part of his Great Society vision, with anti-poverty programs and his civil rights agenda. When Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968, he fired everyone from Johnson’s commission, appointed a different commission, and charged it with planning a Bicentennial that would celebrate American greatness, the Nixon presidency, and the GOP.
There was enormous controversy because of the corruption involved in funding the Bicentennial and the amount of money allocated for the Bicentennial that was actually being used to advance Nixon’s reelection campaign. After Watergate, the commission was dissolved and replaced by Gerald Ford with a new Bicentennial administration whose project was essentially to do nothing except give money away to the states: to local historical societies, museums, libraries, schools, and community organizations. There was a lot of cynicism about it. People called it the “Buy-centennial” because there was so much commercial merchandise. But it ended up being mostly okay.
If you look at something like the 1973 commemoration of the Boston Tea Party, it descended into what I think was a beautiful kind of political chaos. Vietnam veterans protested the war. Native American groups protested the colonists, dressing as Mohawks. There were gay rights demonstrations and Equal Rights Amendment activists. People were saying: “No, that’s not what we want to celebrate. We want to use this moment to advance our own vision of justice.”
So in many ways, today’s arguments about democratic inclusion and representation are not that different from those during the Bicentennial. The difference is that Ford, to his everlasting credit, didn’t try to impose a single national story about what the Bicentennial meant, which is, of course, what the Trump administration is doing now.
HPR: As we look back over the past 250 years, do you think the Constitution has been more successful as a framework for democratic expansion, the expansion of “We the People,” or has it often acted as a constraint on democratic change?
JL: Well, it’s both. In 1787, the Constitution did have anti-democratic — or perhaps more accurately, aristocratic — elements in it, like the Electoral College and to an extent, lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices. And that was the case in the states as well; they had property restrictions on voting, vested almost extreme power in governors while weakening the legislature, and relied on appointed judges.
It’s important to remember that in 2026, we celebrate not just the Declaration, but also the first state constitutions. New Hampshire adopted the first state constitution in January 1776, and other states followed.
Political scientists and legal scholars would say that the U.S. Constitution is unusually underdeveloped relative both to other national constitutions and to our own state constitutions. The average lifespan of a written constitution is about eighteen years. This is more similar to state constitutions. In the 1820s and 1830s, during the era of Jacksonian democracy, pretty much every state either rewrote its constitution or substantially amended it. They dropped property qualifications for voting, shifted power away from governors and toward legislatures, and in many cases moved from appointed judges to elected judges. There was a real democratization of state constitutions. At the same time, many states also instituted racial restrictions, so it’s not a simple story of progress.
But our federal Constitution has been in place since 1787, in no small part because it is extraordinarily difficult to amend, and has only truly changed with extreme upheaval. And one reason people were reluctant to open it up was that they knew, sooner or later, you would have to confront the issue of slavery.
Yes, there have been some important amendments, but to the extent that our constitutional system has become more democratic, much of that change has come through Supreme Court decisions and interpretation.
HPR: Given this inflexibility, why is it that so many of the groups originally excluded from America’s constitutional framework ultimately sought to claim the Constitution rather than reject it?
JL: I think that’s partly a strategy question. The most famous example is Frederick Douglass. When he was a young abolitionist working with William Lloyd Garrison, Garrison famously burned the Constitution and called it a “covenant with hell.” He believed the Constitution sanctioned slavery and therefore could never be a useful tool for abolition.
Douglass eventually came to think that, whether it was true or not, it was a mistake to argue that way. You might as well argue that the Constitution does not sanction slavery and then fight on those grounds. It’s much more effective to say, “The Constitution is on my side. You’re just misreading it.” The problem, thus, was the moral blindness of the American people, and he could fight with the Constitution at his side rather than against it.
HPR: You’ve spent so much of your career studying the American past. Has researching American history made you more hopeful or less hopeful about the future of the United States — and about the future of democracy itself?
JL: In my upcoming book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” I argue that we don’t really have liberal constitutional democracies anymore because we live in what I call an artificial state. The public sphere no longer exists as a place where human beings gather, deliberate, and exercise judgment as citizens. Americans haven’t held state constitutional conventions on any significant scale since the 1980s. We increasingly don’t trust one another enough to gather in the same room and deliberate together. And that problem seems to get worse year after year.
Our public sphere is now dominated by bots and corporations that control our political discourse. I don’t think we can have democracy until we find ways to constrain the power of multinational corporations over that discourse. And I don’t know how that happens, honestly. The political power of these corporations is dependent on their economic power, and I don’t see how those monopolies are broken in the short term. So, I’m not especially optimistic.
HPR: If polarization and the erosion of a shared public sphere are among the defining challenges of this moment, what do you think is the defining achievement Americans can look back on after 250 years?
JL: I do believe in the truths declared in the Declaration of Independence: that all people are created equal and endowed with certain rights. The United States was founded as an experiment in the possibility that people could govern themselves. I think that idea endures. It has spread, and it has been essential to improving the lives of people both in the United States and around the world. Those are the ideas on which the nation was founded; most Americans believe them, and I do think they endure. We should be proud of those truths.
