Lafayette in the Somewhat United States Study Guide

Though she was born and raised in Oklahoma before heading north to Montana for college, Sarah Vowell has always been fascinated by the stories and heroes of American’s eastern coast. After studying art history—and developing a passion for viewing the past through physical markers and artifacts—Vowell began to write longform nonfiction, mixing history, humor, and memoir to great success. Much of Vowell’s work takes a similarly sardonic view of the United States’ first 200 years: her book The Wordy Shipmates follows the Puritans’ initial pilgrimage from Britain to America, while her book Unfamiliar Fishes examines how Hawaii was brutally annexed to the United States. In addition to writing these books (along with several others), Vowell is also an essayist, a contributing editor for the radio program This American Life, and an actress. She currently lives in New York City.

Lafayette is a history book about the American Revolution, so the skirmishes and treaties that defined that war are essential to Vowell’s project. Of particular note for Vowell are the 1777 Battle at Brandywine in Pennsylvania; the 1778 Battle at Monmouth, New Jersey; and the 1783 Battle of Yorktown in Virginia, where the Americans finally claimed victory over the British. But Vowell is also deeply concerned with the events of her own time. For instance, Vowell’s trips to federal monuments are complicated by the 2013 government shutdown, in which Republican congressmen (most prominently Texas Senator Ted Cruz) refused to pass routine budget legislation in protest of the Democrats’ Affordable Care Act. But even more importantly, Vowell’s initial motivation to research Lafayette stemmed from the anti-French sentiment that abounded in the U.S. in the early 2000s. After France refused to sign on to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, many Americans began to criticize the French, even pushing to rename French fries to “freedom fries”—a move so absurd that Vowell felt she had no choice but to correct the historical record.

Though Vowell writes a sweeping, accessible history of the Revolutionary War, her research is grounded in denser, more specific scholarly texts. To give context for the larger conflict, she turned to books like Wayne Carp’s To Starve the Army at Pleasure, which examines the administrative failures of the new United States government, and Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution, about the ideological roots of American democracy. To learn more about Lafayette as an individual, Vowell used Harlow Giles Unger’s 2002 biography Lafayette and David Clary’s 2007 Adopted Son: Washington, Lafayette and the Friendship that Changed America (among many others). Importantly, though, Vowell trained as an art historian, which means that in her work she often prioritizes tangible artifacts and “found objects” over written source material.