Last Tuesday evening at the Villa Aurelia, American Academy in Rome Director Christopher S. Celenza, FAAR’94, sat down with Harvard University Professor Jill Lepore and an international audience to consider “Arms in America: Gun Violence in the United States in Global Perspective” for the seventh installment of the Academy’s series of Conversations That Matter. The academy was honored to have United States Ambassador David Thorne and his wife Rose in attendance.
Director Celenza opened the floor by clarifying that, “There are many different positions on this controversial question, and the Academy, not being a policy institution, cannot and does not advocate for or against political issues. But we welcome free inquiry of all sorts.” The aim of this series is to create a wider platform for communication with the public on current issues that affect all people’s lives, whether inside or outside of academia, and Jill Lepore’s work epitomizes just such an attempt to plug academic research into public discourse. She researches the histories of war and violence, language and literacy, often exploring absences and asymmetries of evidence in the historical record. Lepore’s book, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. A staff writer for The New Yorker, Lepore has also published numerous articles in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, the Journal of American History and American Quarterly.
After an introduction by Director Celenza, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Chair of the History and Literature Program at Harvard offered initial remarks on what she called, “an artificially polarized debate.” Lepore discussed gun ownership, homicide rates, the death penalty, and militarism within American and European historical contexts. She then argued that debates surrounding the Second Amendment emerged only in the 1970s as a means to energize participation in politics. Previously the amendment had received so little attention from historians as to be nicknamed “the lost amendment.” Academy Trustee William B. McGurn III then provided some Italian context to the issue. Although a person is statistically five times more likely to be murdered in New York City than in Rome, it is also true that Italy’s murder rate is higher than its Northern European neighbors and the country is one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers.
There followed a brief exchange between Jill Lepore and Director Celenza, and a series of questions from the audience. Issues discussed included how the collective trauma of war might play a role in a culture’s changing relationship to violence in civilian life, how the utopian possibility of perpetual peace has permitted new theories of total war in which anything is permissible in one last fight, how the idea of gun ownership as an absolute right has be linked to developing notions of freedom in recent years, and how language itself has molded the debate. If it is impossible for language to escape the historical and cultural context of its production, how sensible is our search for authentic meaning? And might the search for an authentic America sidetrack the project of building a better America? Jill Lepore paints a picture of a society searching to find concrete answers to contemporary problems in a document that is inevitably saturated in the fluid lifeblood of American history.