The full name was Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, which was quite a mouthful for Yankee sensibilities, but the Marquis de Lafayette became one of the first American celebrities anyway. (The new nation had a sweet tooth for the flattery of Frenchmen. That’s also how Tocqueville managed to freeload his way across the Northwest Territories.) Lafayette came over the Atlantic to fight in the American Revolution when he was 19. He went home to France and tried to be a centrist politician during that country’s upheaval. This was rather like aspiring to be a pot roast in a den of wolverines. But he survived the Revolution and the Terror, turned down a job in Napoleon’s government, and in 1824, he returned to the United States at the invitation of James Monroe. He visited all 24 of the states at the time. The tour took more than a year, and Lafayette was cheered at every stop. He survived the sinking of his steamboat in the Ohio River, and lived to help lay the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, Mass. He also survived an oration by Daniel Webster on that same occasion.

Now comes Sarah Vowell to bring the Marquis back for another tour of the continent. Today, we have television historians. (“Tell us, Doris/Michael/Douglas: How does Bobby Jindal remind you of Burton Wheeler?”) We also have martial historians, who provide the raw material for Tom Hanks to make yet another mini-series about the heroic efforts of white people. And then we have Vowell, who is an ambling historian. In her latest, “Lafayette in the Somewhat United States,” Vowell wanders through the history of the American Revolution and its immediate aftermath, using Lafayette’s involvement in the war as a map, and bringing us all along in her perambulations — with occasional side trips to such modern phenomena as Colonial Williamsburg, the many protesters who have flocked to Lafayette Square across from the White House and Vowell’s curious fascination with, and fascinated curiosity about, Quaker historians. She encounters one of the breed while visiting the Brandywine Valley, where Lafayette once served with distinction even after having been wounded, and Vowell uses the episode to give a shrewd précis of what she’s about generally.

“Having studied art history, as opposed to political history, I tend to incorporate found objects into my books,” she writes. “Just as Pablo Picasso glued a fragment of furniture onto the canvas of ‘Still Life With Chair Caning,’ I like to use whatever’s lying around to paint pictures of the past — traditional pigment like archival documents but also the added texture of whatever bibs and bobs I learn from looking out bus windows or chatting up the people I bump into on the road.”