Public engagement with historical memory and historical knowledge helps people understand that “everything has a history.” This engagement with the past evolves in all kinds of public remembrances, but anniversary commemorations of historic events provide special opportunities to show “why history matters” and to remind participants that present-day actions contribute to the history of their own cities or institutions.

This panel will examine important aspects of historical memory and public history by discussing how American communities celebrated the 200^th anniversary of Lafayette’s 1824-25 tour of the United States at some 350 public events across 24 states in 2024-25. Our discussion will emphasize that commemorative events can link past conflicts and generations to enduring concerns such as the protection of human rights and the defense of democratic institutions.

Lafayette’s 1824-25 tour became an early example of public history as Americans honored and celebrated the American Revolution. This national “welcome” for Lafayette, in other words, might be called a prelude to the fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution; and the bicentennial celebrations of that nineteenth-century tour became a striking recent example of public history in American communities.

This session will therefore briefly review the purposes and events of the original tour, which included Lafayette’s emphasis on the differences between participatory democracy and autocracy, the expanding struggle for human rights, and the ongoing wars for national independence. The bicentennial events in 2024-25 brought such historical issues into contemporary public conversations while they were also portraying the pageantry, parades, balls, banquets, and national pride of the nineteenth-century tour.

The American Friends of Lafayette organized a bicentennial committee that developed commemorative activities through partnerships with local governments, historical societies, libraries, museums, historic sites, national park services sites, and patriotic heritage organizations such as the DAR and the SAR.

Professional and non-academic historians often spoke at bicentennial events to correct historical inaccuracies or to revise local legends. There were also frequent discussions of abolitionism, women’s rights, and the historical abuse of Native Americans, all of which were important to Lafayette, as well as the modern history of human rights.

This session will thus discuss the challenges and successes of the “public history” events that celebrated the “Lafayette on Tour” bicentennial and helped Americans engage with issues that remain historically significant during the Era of “America 250.”