Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon

by Scott E. Casper

Historian Casper relates the complex tale of Mount Vernon's triple identities, home, workplace, and enduring, malleable national symbol, via the lives of its black workers and residents, slave and free, and its owners while he restores African-Americans' essential roles as actors both as historical persons doing the work of maintaining Mount Vernon and as theater, today playing the roles that maintain an illusion of 18th-century accuracy.