Courtesy photo.
Award-winning historian and acclaimed journalist Jill Lepore analyzes the challenges faced by efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution
SUMMARY
- UCSB Arts & Lectures presents Jill Lepore delivering a lecture titled Amend: Rewriting the Constitution
- Tue, Oct 24 | 7:30 p.m. | Campbell Hall
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- The two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist will bring her wit, empathy and insight to the questions: How has the U.S. Constitution become one of the most difficult in the world to change? And what are the consequences for a society whose constitution is frozen in time?
- Part of UCSB Arts & Lectures’ Justice For All Initiative
- $20 – $35 / All students $10 (with valid ID)
- Tickets & Info: www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu
“Jill Lepore is a national treasure.” – Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains
“Everything Jill Lepore writes is distinguished by intelligence, eloquence, and fresh insight.” – Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book
SANTA BARBARA — UCSB Arts & Lectures presents Jill Lepore delivering a public lecture titled Amend: Rewriting the Constitution on Tuesday, October 24 at 7:30 p.m. at UCSB Campbell Hall. Award-winning historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Jill Lepore brings her panoptic range and razor-sharp style to a discussion of the Supreme Court’s role in the U.S. Constitution’s unamendability. The U.S. Constitution was always meant to be added to and improved – amending is what makes the Constitution everyone’s, says Lepore. How has the U.S. Constitution become one of the most difficult in the world to change? And what are the consequences for a society whose constitution is frozen in time?
Jill Lepore on The New Yorker Radio Hour on why it’s so hard to amend the U.S. Constitution – and why that matters
ABOUT JILL LEPORE
Jill Lepore is a writer and professor of history whose essays and books explore absences and asymmetries in the historical record. She is also a bestselling author and journalist who once wrote “History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence.” James Gleick has said of her, “Lepore is a brilliant and prolific historian with an eye for unusual and revealing stories.” Susan Orlean noted, “Everything Jill Lepore writes is distinguished by intelligence, eloquence and fresh insight.” Her popular podcasts explore the themes “Who Killed Truth?” and “The Rise of Doubt.”
In her lecture Amend: Rewriting the Constitution, Lepore takes on one of the knottiest problems facing the American republic in the 21st century. Our founders deliberately made the U.S. Constitution hard to amend but not impossible. Over time, that process has become more difficult, even as the number and urgency of issues requiring constitutional reform have multiplied. Bringing her characteristic panoptic perspective to the situation, Lepore will help us ponder the now-crucial meta-question: Does the amending process need to be amended? With the decades-long (and thus far unsuccessful) struggle to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in mind, the high barrier to constitutional change appears to be a central obstacle on our country’s journey toward justice for all.
Since arriving at The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2005, Lepore has brought freshness, curiosity and literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis and scrutiny of the affairs of the nation itself. Her latest book, The Deadline, compiles 46 essays written over the last decade – including three unpublished ones – that offer a prismatic portrait of American life and letters, politics and technology, law and society. From gun rights and police brutality to Bratz dolls and bicycles, and from lockdowns to the losses that haunt Lepore’s own life, these essays again and again cross what Lepore calls “the dead line,” the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead.” With this astonishingly wide-ranging collection, the writer and historian aims to make sense of the first wobbly decades of the twenty-first century, “a time that felt like a time, that felt like history.” Challenging both the right and the left, Lepore objects to easy, hair-trigger partisanship, making the case for an open-minded, democratic society, animated by inquiry.
Lepore’s first book, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, won the Bancroft Prize, the most prestigious award in the field of American history writing. Her book, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Book of Ages was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Secret History of Wonder Woman, described as a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history, won the American History Book Prize. These Truths: A History of the United States, was an international bestseller named one of Time magazine’s top ten non-fiction books of the decade. In 2020, she published her fourteenth book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. In 2021, she was named the winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. Her audio work includes hosting the podcast The Last Archive, the limited series, Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket, and The Search for Big Brown. Her new audiobook is Who Killed Truth? (Pushkin, June 13, 2023). She recently contributed an introduction to Paul McCartney’s book 1964: Eyes of the Storm (Liveright/W W Norton, June 13, 2023).
Lepore is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University. Other essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Affairs, Yale Law Journal, American Scholar and American Quarterly; her works have been widely translated and anthologized.
Lively, funny, and argumentative, Lepore’s books have been described as surprising and enlightening, as well as elegant, sobering, beautifully written and intellectually rigorous.
ABOUT UCSB ARTS & LECTURES
Founded in 1959, UCSB Arts & Lectures (A&L) is the largest and most influential arts and lectures organization between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A&L annually presents more than a hundred public events, from critically acclaimed concerts and dance performances by world-renowned artists to talks by groundbreaking authors and film series at UCSB and Santa Barbara-area venues. With a mission to “educate, entertain and inspire,” A&L also oversees an outreach program that brings visiting artists and speakers into local classrooms and other venues for master classes, open rehearsals, discussions and more, serving K-12 students, college students and the general public.
Jill Lepore is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures.
Tickets are $20 – $35: General Public / $10 All Students (with valid ID)
For tickets or more information, call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535 or purchase online at www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu.
Books will be available for purchase and signing, courtesy of Chaucer’s
Major Sponsor: Sara Miller McCune
Justice for All Lead Sponsors: Marcy Carsey, Connie Frank & Evan Thompson, Eva & Yoel Haller, Dick Wolf and the Zegar Family Foundation
Presented in association with Santa Barbara County Bar Association, Santa Barbara Women Lawyers and UCSB Department of History
UCSB Arts & Lectures gratefully acknowledges our Community Partners the Natalie Orfalea Foundation & Lou Buglioli for their generous support of the 2023-2024 season.