In her latest book, These Truths: A History of the United States (Norton, Sept.), Jill Lepore delivers a comprehensive history of America for general readers. While the book is replete with stories throughout American history, the biggest truth Lepore wants to share comes from reflecting on the kinds of books historians write.

“It used to be that historians, when they reached a certain point in their career, would produce a kind of epic American history that was a piece of public work,” says the Harvard University historian. Then they stopped.

In recent decades, a new generation broke down barriers and began telling histories that had previously been forgotten or ignored. “They offered a corrective to what had been a very narrow account of the American past,” says Lepore. For good reasons and bad, she says, historians—herself included—moved away from writing big histories.

After spending time chronicling Tea Party activists in 2009, Lepore wondered if historians had gotten too specific. In the absence of an authoritative, wide-angle view, she says, the public’s ideas about American history have become a “picture book version of the American past.”

“What I hear from a lot of people,” Lepore continues, “is that they are actually kind of hungry for a kind of deeper, longer explanation of the present.” For her, that begins with history.

Lepore credits the very scholarship that turned away from larger histories with providing the detailed, raw material that allows These Truths to say something new. For instance, technology is a common touchstone throughout the book, and often overlooked in older histories of the United States. Individual figures like William Jennings Bryan are also given a second look that goes beyond his portrayal in the 1960 classic film Inherit the Wind. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly is given much more credit for the modern conservative movement than William Buckley. Lepore takes no small amount of pleasure in the idea that people may disagree with some of her assertions. That, too, she says, is part of the tradition of writing an epic history. “They weren’t swallowed whole,” she says of books like Woodrow Wilson’s multivolume A History of the American People.

“People argued about them.”