Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

by

Sarah Vowell

Themes and Colors
Democracy, Disagreement, and Compromise Theme Icon
Landscape and Historical Memory Theme Icon
Youthful Glory vs. Mature Leadership Theme Icon
Freedom and Protest Theme Icon
War, Politics, and Family Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Landscape and Historical Memory Theme Icon

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 the Smithsonian museum. But while these political artifacts are celebrated, Vowell is repeatedly struck by how former battlefields—though they were equally important to the nation’s history—are unmarked and unremarkable. To the layman, these once-violent sites appear like any other peaceful, rolling fields or bustling suburbs. While she retraces Lafayette’s steps, Vowell realizes how easily history can be forgotten in favor of daily routines. Even the fact that Americans celebrate Independence Day on July 4 is telling: rather than rejoicing on October 19, the anniversary of the Patriots’s actual military victory, the U.S. has always dated its creation to the day when a piece of paper (the Declaration of Independence) was signed. As she studies statements from John Adams to today’s politicians, Vowell ultimately comes to believe that this revisionism is intentional. The conspicuous absence of war monuments demonstrates how the United States glorifies its ideological turning points while erasing the violence that made such political success possible.

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Landscape and Historical Memory Quotes in Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

Below you will find the important quotes in Lafayette in the Somewhat United States related to the theme of Landscape and Historical Memory.
Pages 1-59 Quotes

In other words, Lafayette mania circa 1824 was specific to him and cannot be written off as the product of a simpler, more agreeable time. In the United States of America, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Marquis de Lafayette
Page Number: 10
Explanation and Analysis:

Because these words convinced Louis XVI to open his heart and, more important, his wallet to the patriots, Vergennes’s memo arguably had as much practical effect on the establishment of American independence as the Declaration of Independence itself. Jefferson’s pretty phrases were incomplete without the punctuation of French gunpowder.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Thomas Jefferson , King Louis XVI , Count de Vergennes
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Pages 60-125 Quotes

To establish such a forthright dreamland of decency, who wouldn’t sign up to shoot at a few thousand Englishmen, just as long as Mr. Bean wasn’t one of them? Alas, from my end of history there’s a big file cabinet blocking the view of the sweet natured Republic Lafayette foretold, and it’s where the guvment keeps the folders full of Indian treaties, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and NSA-monitored electronic messages pertinent to national security.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Marquis de Lafayette, Adrienne de Lafayette
Page Number: 71
Explanation and Analysis:

The place looks wrong. I’m not bothered that the present intrudes on the past, what would the combination Pizza Hut-Taco Bell looming near a road once crammed with redcoats; or that Fuzzy Butts Dog Daycare is situated a stone’s throw from the old Quaker house where Lafayette reportedly spent the night before the battle. No, my problem is springtime. The Brandywine countryside is in bloom—too green, too chirpy, too full of life.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker)
Related Symbols: Fields and Hills
Page Number: 93
Explanation and Analysis:

Just as Densmore’s religious ethics seemed to filter through his nonfiction, my background bubbles up into mine. 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.”

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Christopher Densmore
Page Number: 113
Explanation and Analysis:
Pages 126-190 Quotes

“Do not underestimate my ignorance about a war we were not really taught in England,” [my British friend] continued. “We concentrated on the wars we won—the First World War, the Second, the Tudors. Nobody taught me American history. Well, maybe a bit when we study the Georges—there was always trouble off stage in America. To us it was just the loss of a colony.”

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker)
Page Number: 160
Explanation and Analysis:

Anyone who accepts the patriot’s 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 4th of July, not mine.”

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Frederick Douglass (speaker), Thomas Jefferson
Page Number: 178
Explanation and Analysis:
Pages 190-268 Quotes

The Americans, who had been British for centuries and not British for only three years, were quick to turn on the French after Newport—too quick. Most of that ire can be explained by the current events in Rhode Island, but some of the patriot disdain was older, in their blood.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Count d’Estaing , Benedict Arnold , John Sullivan
Page Number: 205
Explanation and Analysis:

For that reason, some scholars consider this somewhat forgotten maritime dust up—referred to as the Battle of the Chesapeake […]—to be the most important altercation of the American Revolution, a take that’s all the more astonishing considering not a single American took part in it. Nor did a single American even witness it.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Marquis de Lafayette, Count de Grasse , Alexander Hamilton
Page Number: 234
Explanation and Analysis:

Over at the battlefield, we drove from the site of the French encampment to the French artillery park to the French Cemetery, where someone had left a single yellow daisy on the plaque commemorating the burial of fifty unknown French soldiers. Then we went for lunch on the York River waterfront at the Water Street Grille, a few yards away from a statue of Admiral de Grasse. There were freedom fries on the menu.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), Count de Grasse
Related Symbols: Freedom Fries
Page Number: 240
Explanation and Analysis:

Following the lead of John Adams, Americans prefer to think of the American Revolution not as an eight-year war but rather as a revolution “effected before the War commenced.” We like to believe, as Adams did, that the revolution was “in the minds and hearts of the people,” as opposed to the amputated limbs and bayoneted torsos of Continental and French casualties.

Related Characters: Sarah Vowell (speaker), John Adams (speaker)
Page Number: 258
Explanation and Analysis: