One of the quickest ways to end conversations in casual social gatherings is to contradict someone expounding on myth, hearsay, and bad history. You’ve been there; we all have. Someone at some point starts holding forth on some chestnut of popular apprehension and repeats a story that has suffered the manifold revisions of a game of telephone that render the story factless, in service to a line of self-aggrandizing chest-beating at the expense of the truth. Stories many of us take for granted in the first place and, because we’ve never heard or bothered to find out the real story, assume to be accurate. We grow accustomed to thinking about these stories this way and then, when it might matter in ways we never anticipated, we don’t know that they have prepared the ground for us to swallow bigger misconstruals and even outright lies.

Into this, occasionally, steps someone who knows better and points out the flaws in the presentation. A curious thing usually happens. Either the conversation turns away from that topic or everyone gets angry. Not at the one disseminating the broken narrative but at the lone voice that contradicts the nonsense. Such reactions lead eventually one of two interpretations—either that people in general don’t care what the facts are or, adjacent, they like the error-laden chestnut more than the reality.

The reception of the corrective information can have a chilling effect on the one offering the facts. No one likes to be ostracized,

It can be puzzling. What is it about these skewed narratives that people preferred? Well, almost always there is something about them that makes people feel good about themselves—about their patriotism, they beliefs, their affiliations, but mostly about their ignorance. Once we leave school, most of us feel we are done with homework, which no one really liked anyway, and the idea that we may be less knowledgeable than perhaps we need to be just suggests that we need to do more homework. I suspect there’s an unexamined aspect of psychology that says that to be an Adult is to already have all the skills and knowledge we need. More study seems justifiable only if it leads to higher income. Even then, excuses can be made to avoid it.

But the reality is we need always to know more, especially about stories we think we know. The how, why, and wherefore of our history feeds into present issues in ways that, if we are ignorant, can lead to political and social traps.

When reading a first-class historian like Jill Lepore, one becomes aware of how tangled those webs into which we might fall can be. For those of us who may delight in being that one person at the party who will speak fact to ignorance, her books are a delight.

Her latest, The Deadline, is a collection of essays designed to counter the shallow, poorly-understood history that underlies so many of the canards foisted upon us daily as truth. As well, they are a delight to read.

In several books, Lepore has displayed an approach to her subjects that bypasses the various filters with which we view our history, opening side entrances into the underlying realities of which modern myths are formed. She examines the cultural touchstones by which we navigate the pathways of our presumably common identity.

Here, we find a range of essays that cover most of American history, topical subjects, thorny personal issues, memoir, and observations about the nature of knowing—or not knowing—what’s going on. Quite a few pieces are about the business of news itself, covering processes and personalities, and giving us a glimpse of how what we think we know comes to us too often “prepared” so a particular message is put forth, even while it is possible to find out what the other facts are. To that problem, we learn that there is nothing new about “fake news” other than the delivery vectors (and perhaps the speed with which it comes at us) but that even when such distortions seem impossible to counter, somehow we seem not to be fooled for long. That may be changing, though, and Lepore gives us her perspective on that as well.

Essentially, Lepore gives us a clear-eyed view of ourselves and our proclivities, often with the unpleasant but unsurprising conclusion that if we are fooled, it’s because we wish to be. But really there is no excuse for blindly reacting to hormone-spiking jabs at our panic buttons. We just need to know a little better.

As I say, Jill Lepore has become one of my favorite historians. She has a quirky set of interests (she did a marvelous book about the creator of Wonder Woman as well as penning one of the most interesting histories of the United States I’ve read in a long time) and this allows her to approach even the most convoluted subjects in ways that consistently illuminate. Along the way, she lets us know that one of the best ways to not be fooled is to refuse to accept the soundbite, the meme, or the two-minute report as the end of the story. While each may well contain a grain of truth, we have to understand that it’s only a grain and all that went into it is so much more interesting, richer, and liberating.