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

Jill Lepore is Assistant Professor of History at Boston University.

"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

The New York Times - Alan Brinkley

…a brief but valuable book, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History…combines [Lepore's] 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. The architects of the Constitution, she makes clear, did not agree about what it meant. Nor did they believe that the Constitution would or should be the final word on the character of the nation and the government. It was the product of much compromise, and few were satisfied with all its parts.

Foreword by Ruth O'Brien ix Prologue Party Like It's 1773 1
Chapter 1: Ye Olde Media 20
Chapter 2: The Book of Ages 43
Chapter 3: How to Commit Revolution 70
Chapter 4: The Past upon Its Throne 98
Chapter 5: Your Superexcellent Age 126
Epilogue Revering America 152
Acknowledgments 167
Notes 169
Index 199