Book of the Month: April 2025 – Travis Gilbert's Pick

"Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy" by Nathaniel Philbrick

Travels With George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy by Nathaniel Philbrick

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Old Baldy Foundation's Book of the Month series! In this new initiative, our team will share their favorite reads from the Museum Store's new Book Room. For April 2025, we’re excited to feature the selection of our Director of Philanthropy, Travis Gilbert.

Travis's pick is Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy by Nathaniel Philbrick, a profound exploration of George Washington’s life through the lens of modern travel. After years of immersing himself in Philbrick’s comprehensive Revolutionary War trilogy, Travis reflects on how this final work completes his journey with the author, blending history and personal narrative.

Travis recounts his experiences reading Travels with George

Author Nathaniel Philbrick’s Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy arrived on my reading pile after I voraciously consumed the author’s trilogy on the Revolutionary War. As Philbrick’s final bow, Travels With George was the benediction I needed to conclude my ten-year, thousand-page journey with Philbrick’s rhythmic narration on the War for Independence.

With Travels, Philbrick excuses himself from professional expectation that historians remain passive voices in their art. Instead, Philbrick claims the first person in a familiar tone, making the reader feel as if they’re in the car’s backseat. With Philbrick in the driver’s seat, the reader traces Washington’s travels as America’s first President searching for the meaning of Washington in the modern era. Of course, the answer(s) are illusive, and have remained so since Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Keroac’s On the Road or Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley. This esteemed literary tradition has taught us that resolution lies in the journey, not the destination.

These epistles are a uniquely American genre–passports for a people always in motion. With Travels, Philbrick joins Tony Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic) and Imani Perry (South to America) in creating a place for historians within the celebrated American travelogue. In this realm, history escapes static factoids and fulfills its birthright of fulfilling a society’s present needs. In Philbrick’s backseat, we discover many different George Washingtons across time and space, and we come closer to accepting that the future holds just as many versions of Washington as the past. At the road's end, the reader isn’t disappointed having not found Washington. Instead, the journey taught us that each generation will forge histories that fulfill the need of the time, with the only constant being the need for a national story.

In Travels with George, Philbrick gently adjusts the rearview mirror to cast a reflection of ourselves, reminding us of history’s true power, and the awesome responsibility we share as stewards of the past.

Join us in celebrating this compelling read that links the past to the future, offering new insights on an enduring American figure. Copies of Travels with George and many more captivating history books are available in the Museum Store today!