America, the Ongoing Experiment

The index of Jill Lepore's monumental new single-volume history of the United States runs to 43 pages and contains 5,456 entries. The first of these is for something called the “ABC list”. And since by convenient coincidence this rather obscure list is something I actually knew a little about (whereas of the second entry, the members of a tribe of native Americans in Maine known as the Abenakis, I was shamefully ignorant), I thought it would be interesting to see whether Lepore, a wildly popular Harvard historian and magazine writer, had managed, deep down in the devil-details of her 933-page book, to get it right.