Listen to this play, "The Epic of America." And it's clear why Jill Lepore finds it relevant now. They produced radio plays, many of them funded by the government's Federal Theatre Project, which put unemployed artists and writers to work in the Depression. INSKEEP: American artists and writers set out to make sure Americans understood and celebrated their experiment in self-government. LEPORE: Americans who are concerned about the failure of democracy in other states began to think that one reason democracies failed was that people didn't understand what ingredients were necessary for them to thrive. STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: Jill Lepore explored that time while writing her book "These Truths: A History Of The United States." And she discovered a story that is fitting to hear on the radio because in the 1930s - the time of the Depression, of Hitler, of Mussolini, of Stalin - some people used the radio to defend the ideas of the United States. MARTIN: Here's our co-host Steve Inskeep. And there's this tremendous despair that the great experiment in the liberal state has failed. JILL LEPORE: People all over the West are watching democracies fall and fall and fall. Historian Jill Lepore has been thinking a lot about the 1930s.
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