Democracy Then and Now: Jill Lepore

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Charleston Library Society

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Democracy Then and Now: Jill Lepore

From the 2026 Pulitzer Prize winner of We the People comes an urgent account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world in The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. Jill Lepore is an international best-selling author, American historian, and journalist currently serving as the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Professor of Law at Harvard University, in addition to her contributions as a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005. As a wide-ranging and prolific essayist, Lepore writes about American history, law, literature, and politics, with much of her scholarship exploring absences and asymmetries in the historical record, giving particular emphasis on the history and technology of evidence. In a year with great emphasis on our 250th, Lepore visits Charleston as part of a limited number of appearances to share this new book and an intimate understanding of the fascinating origins of modern civilization, and the creep of automated democracy in the name of progress that has seen its apotheosis in AI.

P1: 293 (book bundled) @$65

P2: 620 (book bundled) @$55

P3: 100 (no book) @$45

STUDENT & TEACHERS: 60 @$15 (located in P3/rear orchestra

If you are unable to attend the event, but would like to purchase one or more signed copies of the speakers’ books, please visit Buxton Books here.

About the Author

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, which won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for history and was long-listed for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction; The Name of War, which won a Bancroft Prize; New York Burning, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for history; Book of Ages, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Secret History of Wonder Woman; the international best-seller These Truths: A History of the United States; and The Deadline, which received a PEN America award for the art of the essay. She is the host of the podcast “The Last Archive” and of the BBC Radio 4 program “X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.”

“The Artificial State is the factory farming of humans, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, the destruction of both human community and the capacity for self-government, the replacement of rule of, by, and for the people with the rule of machines owned by corporations. Within the Artificial State, humans become to machines what animals have been to humans.” —Jill Lepore