Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy

Nathaniel Philbrick in conversation with Scott Casper

Thursday, September 22, 2022, at 7:00 PM ET

Approx. 1 hour

View program

Does George Washington still matter? Join author Nathaniel Philbrick as he discusses his latest New York Times bestseller, Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy. In his own journey travelling through the thirteen former colonies, Philbrick retraces the steps of George Washington's 1789 tour of America and examines the president’s unique contribution to the forging of the nation. In the book, Philbrick draws parallels between Washington’s journey and America’s current politically divided landscape, and grapples with Washington’s complicated legacy as a plantation owner who held enslaved people, a reluctant president, and a man of the people.

Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of In the Heart of the Sea, winner of the 2000 National Book Award and the basis of the 2015 movie picture of the same name directed by Ron Howard; Mayflower, a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in History; and a trilogy about the American Revolution that includes Valiant Ambition, winner of the 2017 George Washington Book Prize.


Scott Casper was appointed the eighth president of the Society in December 2020. A historian of the nineteenth-century United States, he has been associated with AAS for three decades, beginning as a Peterson Fellow in 1990. Before joining AAS he served as dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and as Foundation Professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno. Scott is the author of Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine (2008) and Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1999), which won the book prize of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.