Skip to main content

George Washington Slept Here

March 2023
1min read

Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876–1986

By Karal Ann Marling; Harvard University Press; 445 pages.

George Washington has been the constant figure in American life since the day he became President. In a witty, irreverent look at how Americans have viewed the father of our country, Karal Ann Marling traces Washington in our culture from 1876, the date of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, to the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan recalled erroneously our nation’s first leader praying on his knees in the snows of Valley Forge.

Washington is a symbol of unity in an often divided society, and he has been since the Civil War. Marling shows him as a lover and a poet in the 1901 play Washington and the Lady and as the very model of the modern man in advertisements from the 1920s. His idealized rural boyhood was the blueprint for a generation of politicians; Herbert Hoover used it in the election of 1928. Following World War II Washington became a pop idol; today he serves both as an automobile salesman and as the benevolent patriarch who beckons us to sales in February.

Marling has pursued Washington from Mount Vernon to the Super Bowl and through flea markets to meetings of the D.A.R. She has found him in historical romances, in Hollywood epics, and on pin trays; his influence extends to furniture design and national pageantry, to flatware and modern art. The remarkable illustrations are varied and well integrated into the text. Combining historical analysis with art history and cultural criticism, Marling has provided a lively new view of a hero turned into an icon.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "July/August 1989"

Authored by: The Editors

John Philip Sousa and his seventyfive-piece band were brought to town to celebrate the building’s opening.

Authored by: The Editors

James Madison and the Republican Legacy

Authored by: The Editors

Missionary for the Modern

Authored by: The Editors

Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876–1986

Authored by: The Editors

A Biography

Authored by: Garry Wills

When the French Revolution broke out two hundred years ago this month, Americans greeted it enthusiastically. After all, without the French we could never have become free. But the cheers faded as the brutality of the convulsion emerged—and we saw we were still only a feeble newborn facing a giant, intimidating world power.

Authored by: The Editors

The ubiquitous legacy of America’s favorite Frenchman

Authored by: John Kobler

In the years between the dedication of the Statue of Liberty and the First World War, the Divine Sarah was, for hundreds of thousands of Americans, the single most compelling embodiment of the French Republic

Authored by: Mark Jenkins

Remember the excitement of the 1924 Olympics in Chariots of Fire? That was nothing compared with what the U.S. rugby team did to the French at those games.

Authored by: Albert B. Stephenson

The Tin Lizzie carried us into the twentieth century, but she gave us a hell of a shaking along the way. Now a veteran driver tells what everybody knew and nobody bothered to write down.

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.