The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library present the Live Online Presentation of the 2020 Ruth Ratner Miller Memorial Award for Excellence in American History to Dr. Jill Lepore. The Ruth Ratner Miller Memorial Award for excellence in American History was established in 1998 and is sponsored by her four children to honor the life of their mother, Ruth Ratner Miller.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her many books include the international bestseller These Truths and This America. Her latest book is IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.

Much of Lepore’s scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the histories and technologies of evidence. A prize-winning professor, she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, the humanities, and American political history. (On teaching the writing of history, see How to Write a Paper for This Class.) In 2017, she launched the Democracy Project: Arguing with American History, a one-semester undergraduate course on the history of the United States, undertaken through weekly debates in which students use primary sources to argue over competing historical interpretations of turning points in American history. She also teaches at Harvard Law School.