One Founding. Five Generations. The Question of Whose Story Gets Told.
On July 6, two scholars and a former Philadelphia City Councilwoman share a stage as the country approaches its 250th anniversary.
Ask your kid, your parent, and the colleague a generation away from you what they learned in school about who built America.
You will get four different answers. Maybe five. None of them will be wrong. None of them will be complete.
That is the gap I have spent 25 years closing for Fortune 500 brands, federal agencies, and nonprofits. It is also the gap the country is about to walk straight into as we approach our 250th anniversary.
Right now, five generations are reading the same headlines about how America was founded and later fought for their independence. Each one learned a different version in school. Each one will be asked, this year, to make sense of what their version left out.
To celebrate America’s 250th in an empowering way, I’m inviting you to the Same Ground: The President’s House, Valley Forge, and the Question of Whose Story Gets Told on Monday, July 6, from 5 to 8 PM at The Fashion District (Love Lab), 932 Market Street, Philadelphia.
It is a free event, open to the public, and part of the city’s America at 250th programming.
Why This Conversation, and Why Now
A federal court fight over the President’s House slavery exhibit is unresolved as I write this. Blocks from where we will be sitting on July 6, the question of what stays on those walls is still being decided.
I am not interested in shouting about that fight. I am interested in putting the people behind it in one room and letting them be heard. Discovery, not confrontation. Invitation, not lecture.
In the Room
Dr. Cheryl LaRoche, the historical archaeologist who helped excavate the President’s House and uncovered the lives of the nine people George Washington enslaved there. Her career has been the recovery of free Black communities, their churches and cemeteries, and their ties to the Underground Railroad. She is the sole scholar behind that excavation. When she speaks, the ground speaks with her. Pre-order her book The Resurrectors.
Sheilah Vance, Esq., attorney, journalist, historian, and author. A Philadelphia-area native who grew up on Rebel Hill in Gulph Mills, on the ground where Washington's army camped before Valley Forge. She is the author of Threshold to Valley Forge: The Six Days of the Gulph Mills Encampment, the first full account of those six days, recovering the free Black people and enslaved Africans in Washington's ranks. Visit Sheilah’s website to own your copy of Threshold to Valley Forge: The Six Days of the Gulph Mills Encampment.
Blondell Reynolds-Brown, our featured speaker. Twenty years as a Philadelphia City Councilwoman. Dozens of bills that became law. Author of the memoir Walking a Tightrope Backward in High Heels. She knows what it takes to put a city’s contradictions on the floor and hold the room.
Together, they tell the Revolutionary War from both ends of the same contradiction. At Valley Forge, the soldiers who served the cause of a freedom that did not yet include them. At the President’s House, the Black men and women Washington held in bondage in what some call the nation’s first White House.
How Cultural Cohesion Is At Play
Five generations are now reading America’s history at the same time:
A Silent Generation reader who memorized one version of Washington in grade school.
A Baby Boomer who grew up on textbooks the civil rights era was already rewriting.
A Gen Xer like me, who thought we had moved past some of these arguments and is realizing we were wrong.
A Millennial who came of age inside the museum reinterpretation movement.
A Gen Z student asking out loud the questions the rest of us were taught to keep quiet.
That is Generational Intelligence™ in real time. The discipline of reading those differences clearly enough to tell a story all of them can stand inside. Not a watered down story. A more complete one.
Cultural Cohesion is what that story sounds like when you get it right. It is not consensus. It is not a heritage month panel. It is a conversation precise enough to be true and capacious enough to be shared. Same Ground is that conversation, in person, in the city where this country began.
An Invitation
If you are in or near Philadelphia, come. Bring a friend across a generation line. A parent. A grown child. A colleague. A neighbor whose family has been in this city longer than yours, or shorter.
Agenda:
5 to 6 PM: Reception
6 to 8 PM: Program
Book signing after, with Dr. LaRoche signing current titles and taking pre-orders for The Resurrectors, her illustrated chapter book series for younger readers, and Sheilah Vance and Blondell Reynolds-Brown signing their books.
Educators, historians, history seekers, and the 50-plus readers I write this newsletter for. Exactly the room a story like this deserves.
Know someone who would love to attend? Please forward this newsletter to them!
See you in Philadelphia.
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