American Journey (series)

There’s no one place to learn about the early decades of the 19th century. So I set off to see how that history is being remembered in the places where it happened.

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

For generations, depictions of Native Americans have reduced them to either aggressors or victims. But at many public history sites, that is starting to change.

How can one place represent the complexity of the Civil War’s beginnings?

What we remember when we remember the Alamo.

Almost by accident, we find ourselves at the epicenter of the Colorado Gold Rush, which attracted prospectors to the Rockies a decade after the famous bonanza of ‘49.

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

Tracing the life of the author who seemed to be from both everywhere and nowhere.

In the streets of New York, we try to imagine the city as Walt Whitman, and other artists of his time, experienced it.

The Arch in St. Louis stands as a monument to contradictory histories.

Tracing the currents of American history that run through the Great Lakes region.

Visiting the sites of two 19th-century utopian experiments in the American Midwest.

On the trail of whales, Melville, and Douglass in New Bedford.

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.

Dispatches from a spine-tingling day of visits to the places where James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Thomas Cole created their most famous works.

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

In the first half of the 19th century, upstate New York was a hotbed of movements for reform. How visible is that history today?

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

The economic transformations wrought by industrial capitalism in the 1820s and 30s look different when viewed up close.

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

How is the first half of the 19th century depicted in and around the nation’s capital? Ed Ayers hits the road to find out.

Exploring the homes of two presidents, the birthplace of another, and a natural wonder that once drew visitors from far and wide.

Ed Ayers travels back to his childhood stomping grounds in search of traces of the dispossession that took place there generations earlier.

Ed Ayers heads south in search of stories from two centuries ago. Traces are there, but larger meanings remain elusive.

After decades of reading, writing, and teaching about the American past, Ed Ayers sets out to see how that past is remembered in the places where it happened.