George Washington's Mount Vernon as an American Memory Palace, 1799 - Today

3 units

Henry Adams, the great-grandson of John Adams, wrote that in taking patriotic pilgrimages as a child to the late George Washington's Mount Vernon estate, he had been blinded by patriotic nostalgia, and never thought to ask himself or his father how to deal with the moral problem of the centrality of racism and slavery in Mount Vernon's, in Washington's, and, more largely, in America's history. Americans have been visiting Mount Vernon throughout U.S. history: rank and file Revolutionary War veterans, Civil War combatants on both sides of that conflict, the proto-feminist founders of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, Frederick Douglass, Henry Ford, and now nearly-one-million tourists each year. In this course we will explore how Americans have used Mount Vernon as a site to, by turns, protest and celebrate, ossify and alter ideas about America-its history, ecology, politics and meaning--all while eliding or confronting what Henry Adams judged to be the problem at the heart of Mount Vernon's and America's history: how to deduce George Washington from the sum of all wickedness.