North American History: The Explorer’s Class

North American History: The Explorer’s Class

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I retired September 2019 and that winter I spent six weeks in Savannah and a week in New Orleans. I sold my house and went on the road full time in September 2020. All these great, leisurely road trips have allowed me to visit amazing historical sites and museums across the US and several Canadian provinces. While many, like the Gettysburg battlefield, the National WWII Museum or Smithsonian museums, are well-known and busy tourist attractions, others are not sites I would have made time for on limited 2-week vacations.

Some sites deserve more time than I had for a visit; especially some of the large museums deserve two days, but I found them all very interesting. I may not learn as much as I would in a history class but it’s been a wonderful experience, and I’ve learned a lot from great guides, museum docents, and rangers at National Park sites. “History live!”

National Battlefields

The NPS maintains eleven National Battlefields (NB), nine National Military Parks (NMP), four National Battlefield Parks (NBP), and one National Battlefield Site (NBS). I couldn’t find any difference on the NPS site between the designations. When I asked a ranger at one of the sites, another came up and they started discussing it, agreeing it was just different designations at different times when the parks were created and had no specific differences. The first five battlefields preserved, Chickamauga, Gettysburg, Antietam, Vicksburg and Shiloh are all national military parks.

Seventeen are Civil War sites, four Revolutionary War sites, three from the Indian War and one from the War of 1812. The NPS lists more “battlefields” on their website but many are designated forts, historical sites, or monuments. I hope to have time to visit more!

There are obviously many more Civil War battle sites, some maintained by states, some privately owned, like the Battle of Franklin sites in Tennessee. Some of the state maintained or privately owned sites have been managed by Daughters of the Confederacy or Sons of Confederate Veterans, so, unfortunately, focus on the “Lost Cause” / “War between the States” narrative and ignore slavery and the historical reasons for the war.

The NPS app for android/iPhone offers great walking and driving tours of the sites and I highly recommend downloading the app. Download the park inside the app for offline use, too, before visiting. Some of the parks offer guides. I paid for guides at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, both booked through NPS.gov. My Gettysburg guide, William, was excellent. I paid for the 3 hour tour and we could have talked longer. My Vicksburg guide was, unfortunately, a “proud confederate”; those were her exact words. When there are 300+ mentions of slavery in the 11 state secession documents, no, it was not about taxes.

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery–the greatest material interest of the world.”

Mississippi Secession Document

Forts

History Museums

Historical Sites and Memorials

Presidential Sites

Historic and National Cemeteries

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