I work at a college, and one of the things I regularly hear students grumble about is that "history is boring." I disagree, of course, but sometimes it's difficult to explain to a grouchy freshman why history is actually exciting and interesting and often relevant to modern times.



Luckily, I don't have to carry that burden all by myself, because there is Sarah Vowell. (And Bill Bryson. And Nathaniel Philbrick. And David McCullough. And Erik Larson. And Hampton Sides. And Stacy Schiff. But I digre



Vowell: If the French had forgotten America's help in World War II — and they had not; they just opposed a preemptive war in the Middle East based on faulty intelligence that most Americans would end up regretting anyway — it seemed obvious that Americans had forgotten France's help in our war for independence in general and the national obsession with Lafayette in particular.



Schneider: "I would say it was more of a challenge to tell the story, to talk about French help [during the revolution]. Quite often from my guests I would get, 'Hey, I wish they would help now!' or something to that effect. But telling the story, the truth speaks for itself. One of the greatest compliments I've ever received portraying Lafayette was from an older gentleman who listened to the story of Lafayette, with me telling the personal sacrifice that he made and then the sacrifice France made by getting involved in this war and helping us win independence. It brought him to tears, and he said at the end, 'You know, I hated the French until I came in this room. Thank you for sharing that story. I needed to hear that story. I no longer feel that way about the French. Thank you for telling me the truth and the facts about this. Now maybe I'll reevaluate my opinions on the French.' I had accomplished my goal, and that was to tell the true story of the American Revolution and the sacrifice that so many people made — the people here in America, but also those that helped us."





Having studied art history, as opposed to political history, I tend to incorporate found objects into my books. 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 bits and bobs I learn from looking out bus windows or chatting up the people I bump into on the road.



I work at a college, and one of the things I regularly hear students grumble about is that "history is boring." I disagree, of course, but sometimes it's difficult to explain to a grouchy freshman why history is actually exciting and interesting and often relevant to modern times.Luckily, I don't have to carry that burden all by myself, because there is Sarah Vowell. (And Bill Bryson. And Nathaniel Philbrick. And David McCullough. And Erik Larson. And Hampton Sides. And Stacy Schiff. But I digress.) One of the things I enjoy most about Vowell's books is how she doesn't just tell facts and stories from history, she points out the humor in the situation and weaves in comparisons to the current era and unusual events from her travels. I have read several of her books, and they are always interesting and amusing and insightful.In Vowell's latest book,she recounts the life of the Marquis de Lafayette, a Frenchman who voluntarily came to America when he was 19 to fight in the revolution against the British. Vowell visits numerous historic sites and does extensive research on the celebrated war hero. The book covers Lafayette's adventures during the American Revolutionary War, and also his return to the United States in 1824, when he took a grand tour around the country and was cheered and feted wherever he went."As a Frenchman who represented neither North nor South, East nor West, left nor right, Yankees nor Red Sox, Lafayette has always belonged to all of us."A good example of how Vowell mixes history and modern times was when she met with a longtime Lafayette reenactor, Mark Schneider. Schneider was portraying Lafayette in 2003, during the time when the U.S. Congress was so angry at France for not backing an American resolution for military action against Iraq that they foolishly changed the name of French fries to "freedom fries" in the congressional cafeteria. Both Vowell and Schneider put the 2003 events in context:I enjoyed this book, and I learned a lot about Lafayette that I didn't know. It also reminded me of how much I've forgotten about the American Revolutionary War since high school history class. I had read David McCullough'sa few years ago, which is a nice companion piece to Vowell's work.My favorite way to experience a Sarah Vowell book is on audio. She assembles magnificent casts of actors to portray the various historical characters, and theaudiobook was especially good. John Slattery was great at portraying Lafayette, Nick Offerman was perfect as George Washington and Patton Oswalt was an entertaining Thomas Jefferson. Of course, Vowell has an extensive background in radio, so she is always an excellent narrator.Earlier I mentioned Vowell's humor and how she includes unusual events in her narratives. About midway throughshe had an illuminating explanation for this writing habit:That helps explain the charm of Vowell's books. They aren't just history tomes — they're a bitchin' piece of art.The thing that drew me to Lafayette as a subject — that he was that rare object of agreement in the ironically named United States — kept me coming back to why that made him unique. Namely, that we the people have never agreed on much of anything. Other than a bipartisan consensus on barbecue and Meryl Streep, plus that time in 1942 when everyone from Bing Crosby to Oregonian schoolchildren heeded FDR's call to scrounge up rubber for the war effort, disunity is the through line in the national plot — not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington's army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen's pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbors, getting on each other's nerves is our*******[on Layfayette becoming an orphan at 12]Besides the money and land, Lafayette inherited a six-foot tall hole in his heart that only a father figure like George Washington could fill. According to Jefferson, Lafayette's "foible is a canine appetite for popularity." The orphaned only child's puppyish yearning for kinship is at the root of his accomplishments in America, the source of his keyed-up eagerness to distinguish himself, particularly on the battlefield. He tended to confuse glory with love.*******[Vowell is chatting with various Quakers about her research on Lafayette]One of the Friends, Christopher Densmore, says: "We understand our history as war." It is pretty clear by the way he's looking at me that by "we," he means "you," i.e., we non-Quaker Americans. The other Friends nod their heads in vexed agreement. Densmore laments, "If you go to the history section of the Barnes and Noble, it's all war."First of all, let's not forget about. I checked, and the book subtitledis in stock at the two nearby B&Ns in Exton and at the Concord Mall, and for good reason — it's one of the better cod bios in print.I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates. The more knowledge, the better seems like a solid rule of thumb, even though I have watched enough science fiction films to accept that humanity's unchecked pursuit of learning will end with robots taking over the world.*******The most convincing if dispiriting argument for me to augment the supposedly unnecessary embarrassment of war books is that adding another one to the pile ups the odds of my fellow citizens actually cracking one open. In 2009, the American Revolution Center surveyed one thousand U.S. adults on their knowledge of the Revolution. Among the findings: "Many more Americans remember that Michael Jackson sang 'Beat It' than know that the Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution." A bleak revelation, and yet "Beat It" did win the 1984 Grammy for Record of the Year, so the numskulls who took the test knew at least one fact about American history. Sixty percent of those surveyed correctly identified the number of children parented by reality TV personalities Jon and Kate Gosselin, but over a third did not know the century in which the American Revolution took place. More than half of them believed the American Civil War preceded the Revolutionary War (whenever that was). Based on these findings, the situation appears to be more demoralizing than Americans understanding our history as war. What if we don't understand our history at all?*******I would like to see the calamity at Valley Forge as just the growing pains of a new nation. It has been a long time since the men and women serving in the armed forces of the world's only superpower went naked because some crooked townies in upstate New York filched their uniforms. But there's still this combination of governmental ineptitude, shortsightedness, stinginess, corruption, and neglect that affected the Continentals before, during, and after Valley Forget that twenty-first-century Americans are not entirely unfamiliar with ...I'm not just thinking of the Pentagon's blunders. I'm thinking of how the noun "infrastructure" never appears in an American newspaper anymore without being preceded by the adjective "crumbling." Or how my friend Katherine, a public high school English teacher, has had to pay out of her own pocket for her classroom's pens, paper, paper clips, thumbtacks, and, she says, "chalk when I run out," chalk being the one thing her school system promises to provide its teachers for free.It's possible that the origin of what kept our forefathers from feeding the troops at Valley Forge is the same flaw that keeps the federal government from making sure a vet with renal failure can get a checkup, and that impedes my teacher friend's local government from keeping her in chalk, and that causes a decrepit, ninety-three-year-old exploding water main to spit eight million gallons of water down Sunset Boulevard during one of the worst droughts in California history. Is it just me, or does this foible hark back to the root of the revolution itself? Which is to say, a hypersensitivity about taxes — and honest disagreements over how they're levied, how they're calculated, how that money is spent, and by whom. The fact that the Continental Congress was not empowered to levy taxes was the literal reason for the ever-empty patriot coffers. More money would have helped, but it wouldn't have entirely solved the problems of a loosely cinched bundle of states trying to collaborate for the greater good.*******Before we cue the brass section to blare "The Stars and Stripes Forever," it might be worth taking another moment of melancholy silence to mourn the thwarted reconciliation with the mother country and what might have been. Anyone who accepts the patriots' premise that all men are created equal must come to terms with the fact that the most obvious threat to equality in eighteenth-century North America was not taxation without representation but slavery. Parliament would abolish slavery in the British empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1778 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, an entire generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, "This is your Fourth of July, not mine."