American Journey

A journal of my road trip to the formative decades of American history.

I recently finished a manuscript for a book about the first six decades of the 19th century. The book argues that as that century began, the United States remained unscripted — an experiment, a speculation. Then, with startling speed, through unlikely characters and scenes, the new nation improvised a politics, economy, and culture that would define the United States for centuries to come.

While I was editing the book, my wife and I set out to see how Americans today remember that formative era. Below, you’ll find my dispatches about the ways in which stories from that time are — and are not — being told in the places where they took place. New installments in the series are published here every other week. (This travelogue was previously known as Discovery of America.)

Part 1: History on the Road
After decades of reading, writing, and teaching about the American past, I’m setting out to see how that past is remembered in the places where it happened.

Part 2: Gone to Carolina
In our first lengthy journey of the trip, we head south in search of stories from two centuries ago. Traces are there, but larger meanings remain elusive.

Part 3: Native Trails
A visit to our childhood stomping grounds reveals few traces of the exploitation and dispossession that took place there generations earlier.

Part 4: High Domes and Bottomless Pits
On the trip north from TN to OH, we visit the homes of two U.S. presidents, the birthplace of another, and a natural wonder that once drew visitors from far and wide.

Part 5: Our Flag Was Still There
How is the first half of the 19th century depicted in and around the nation’s capital? We hit the road to find out.

Part 6: Tidying Up the Past
A history tour at Harper’s Ferry suggests that “commemoration” and “desecration” might be two sides of the same coin.

Part 7: Time for a Revolution
The economic transformations wrought by industrial capitalism in the 1820s and 30s look different when viewed up close.

Part 8: Rainbows and Disappointments
There is a long and storied tradition of feeling underwhelmed by the natural spectacle of Niagara Falls. Still, the visitors keep coming.

Part 9: No Better Soil
In the first half of the 19th century, upstate New York was a hotbed of movements for reform. How visible is that history today?

Part 10: Sacred Places
A visit to the site of Joseph Smith’s divine revelation makes for a different kind of public history experience.

Part 11: Pieces of the Past
A spine-tingling day of visits to the places where James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Thomas Cole created their most famous works.

Part 12: The Book Read ‘Round the World
Literary history is packed into Concord’s “Old Manse,” but the tiny abode of Walden’s author proves the highlight of our New England trip.

Part 13: Freedom by the Sea
On the trail of whales, Melville, and Douglass in New Bedford.

Part 14: Community Ideal
We visit the sites of two 19th-century utopian experiments in the American Midwest.

Part 15: Lost Prophets and Forgotten Heroes
Tracing the currents of American history that run through the Great Lakes region.

Part 16: A Gateway to the Past
The Arch in St. Louis stands as a monument to contradictory histories.

Part 17: Mettlesome, Mad, Extravagant City
In the streets of New York, we try to imagine the city as Walt Whitman, and other artists of his time, experienced it.

Part 18: Edgar Allan Poe’s America
Tracing the life of the author who seemed to be from both everywhere and nowhere.

Part 19: Oregon Trails
After navigating a minor hiccup in our own provisioning process, we set out for the West on what would be our longest trip yet.

Part 20: The Richest Square Mile on Earth
Almost by accident, we find ourselves at the epicenter of the Colorado Gold Rush, which attracted prospectors to the Rockies a decade after the more famous bonanza of ‘49.

Part 21: Borderland Stories
What we remember when we remember the Alamo.

Part 22: Where Kansas Bled
How can one place represent the complexity of the Civil War’s beginnings?

Part 23: Beyond Dispossession
At public history sites around the country, simplistic depictions of Native Americans are giving way to a much more complex story.

Part 24: Remembering Slavery
At museums and historic sites throughout the American South, a fuller and more complex picture of slavery is finally taking shape.

Part 25: The Era Without a Name
There’s no one place to learn about the first six decades of the 19th century. So I set off to find out how that history is being remembered in the places where it happened.