This one’s for my father, who would slow down family road trips by pulling over at every historical marker we passed.
How historical markers and monuments rewrite U.S. history : NPR
Over the past year, NPR analyzed a database crowdsourced by thousands of hobbyists, looking to uncover the patterns, errors and problems with the country’s markers. The effort revealed a fractured and often confused telling of the American story, where offensive lies live with impunity, history is distorted and errors are sometimes as funny as they are strange.
There are markers memorializing 14 ghosts, two witches, one vampire, a wizard and a couple who, a New Hampshire marker says, may have been abducted by aliens.
I did not know that these markers aren’t necessarily official. So if you stop at a marker, enjoy the fun of discovering new things, while remembering that they might not always be true.
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