The Rise of Doubt
In Season 1 of The Last Archive, acclaimed historian Jill Lepore traced the history of evidence, proof, and knowledge in search of an answer to the question: Who killed truth? A lot of history has happened since then. 2020… and now 2021 with an insurrection, an impeachment, and a mass vaccination campaign. Everything just keeps seeming so unbelievable. So in Season 2, Jill is taking on a new mystery: the rise of doubt over the last 100 years of American history. We’ll meet hypnotists and parapsychologists, Nazis and Soviet propagandists, and voices, too, of reason. Produced in the style of classic 1930s radio drama, The Last Archive is a show about how we know what we know and why it seems, lately, as if we don’t know anything at all.
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Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she writes about politics, history, law, and literature. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her dozen books include These Truths: A History of the United States, cited as “nothing short of a masterpiece” by NPR, and, her latest, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, longlisted for the National Book Award.
Photo credit: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University