Lafayette in the Somewhat United States Themes

In her humorous history Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, Sarah Vowell reflects on the origins of American democracy through the French general Marquis de Lafayette’s perspective. When Lafayette arrived in the colonies to fight on the American side of the Revolutionary War, he expected to find a straightforward conflict between the British Empire and its former subjects. But he was shocked to find that (as Vowell’s title suggests) the colonies were only…

Throughout Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, Sarah Vowell combines history with memoir, describing her present-day visits to major landmarks of the American Revolutionary War. Many crucial sites of U.S. political history remain perfectly preserved and curated: Vowell visits Thomas Jefferson’s famed Monticello home, takes a trip to Colonial Williamsburg to meet a George Washington impersonator, and even stops in to see a pair of her hero Marquis de Lafayette’s gloves at…

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States traces the arc of the American Revolutionary War, in which a ragtag band of British colonial subjects theorized about—and fought violently for—their independence. But Sarah Vowell, a historian and the book’s author, suggests that this call for independence was not quite as simple as the revolutionaries made it seem. On the one hand, the newly democratic nation was dependent on monarchist, hierarchical France, a diplomatic relationship personified in…

At the beginning of Sarah Vowell’s Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, the teenaged Marquis de Lafayette abandons his pregnant wife in France to fight in the United States, a country he had never visited before and could barely conceptualize. As he commits himself to the battle for U.S. independence, however, Lafayette—who was orphaned as a 12-year-old—finds a surrogate family in America’s most important early politicians (and particularly in George Washington, who…