Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon
The Forgotten History of an American Shrine
Casper, Scott E.
Hardcover
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BOOK SYNOPSIS
New Stories From an Old American Shrine
The home of our first president has come to symbolize the ideals of our nation: freedom for all, national solidarity, and universal democracy. Mount Vernon is a place where the memories of George Washington and the era of Americas birth are carefully preserved and re-created for the nearly one million tourists who visit it every year. But behind the familiar stories lies a history that visitors never hear. Sarah Johnsons Mount Vernon recounts the experience of the hundreds of African Americans who are forgotten in Mount Vernons narrative. Historian and archival sleuth Scott E. Casper recovers the remarkable history of former slave Sarah Johnson, who spent more than fifty years at Mount Vernon, before and after emancipation. Through her life and the lives of her family and friends, Casper provides an intimate picture of Mount Vernons operation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, years that are rarely part of its story. Working for the Washington heirs and then the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, these African Americans played an essential part in creating the legacy of Mount Vernon as an American shrine. Their lives and contributions have long been lost to history and erased from memory. Casper restores them both, and in so doing adds a new layer of significance to Americas most popular historical estate.
BOOK REVIEWS
Mount Vernon boasts stories that number in the hundreds, but one of its most dramatic tales has been left untold until now. In Scott Caspers compelling narrative we see sectional crisis, Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction through the eyes of Sarah Johnson and the hundreds of other African Americans who lived and labored at the fabled shrine. The Mount Vernon that belonged to them as much as to Washington and his heirs now testifies to the signal importance of our nations African American past. Mary Kelley, Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan, and author of Learning to Stand and Speak George Washingtons will freed his slaves, yet slavery remained at Mount Vernon. Beginning with this living paradox, Scott Casper tells a fascinating story about the African Americans who lived and worked at a national temple, challenging and tending the myths we still cherish about the home of our countrys father.Eric Rauchway, author of Blessed Among Nations Scott Caspers meticulous excavation of the lives of African-Americans at Mount Vernon holds invaluable lessons about the interplay between race and historical memory in American culture. Based on documents revealing everything from economic hardship and regional conflict to mismanagement and misplaced patriotism, the book also teaches us by example about the rewards of imaginative synthesis and interpretation. Joan Shelley Rubin, University of RochesterIn this impressively researched and highly readable book, Scott Casper provides a new and fascinating picture of one of our national shrines, the Mount Vernon estate of George Washington. For the first time, we understand the Washington family and their plantation from the vantage point of Mount Vernons slave community and specifically though the life of Sarah Johnson who lived there for half a century. This is history at its best, revealing a world at Mount Vernon that few have ever known." --James Oliver Horton, Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History, George Washington University, and author of The Landmarks of African American History
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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 0809084147
ISBN(13-digit): 9780809084142
Dewey Decimal: 973.4/1092
Library of Congress: 2007009348
Book Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 286
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