By Laura June Davis

Living in the state of Georgia—the newest, most remote, and most intimately connected colony to Great Britain during the Colonial and Revolutionary Eras—students often view the American Revolution as a foundational conflict that happened elsewhere. Certainly, there were the Sieges of Savannah and Augusta, the Battles of Kettle Creek and Brier Creek, and the exaggerated “Battle” of the Rice Boats, but such conflicts pale in comparison to the emphasis of Lexington and Concord, Trenton and Princeton, Saratoga, Valley Forge, and/or Yorktown. The saga of Revolutionary War era Georgia, like that of the Gulf Coast, is easily forgotten as it is a “story without minutemen, without founding fathers.” Therefore, teaching the American Revolution in Georgia, “a different war with unexpected participants, forgotten outcomes, and surprising winners and losers,” can be a daunting task for instructors of the History of Georgia course; it comes early in the semester and students struggle to understand its utility, place in the meta narrative of the state’s history, and/or how it relates to the New England-centric narrative they already know. Teaching the war’s legacy on Georgia is even more challenging. Yet, this was the task I faced teaching the course for the first time at Columbus State University (CSU).

At CSU, like many University System of Georgia schools, the History of Georgia (HIST 3105) course fulfills multiple requirements. Georgia Code 20-3-68 requires all undergraduate students to complete coursework or take an exam on the history of Georgia and the Georgia State Constitution. History-Secondary Education majors must also take the course to fulfill their degree requirements and History majors may take it as their lower-level United States history course. As such, my students ranged from sophomore to senior status; 79% were history majors but 21% were not. The Learning Outcomes (LOs) and career ready competencies often associated with the class are critical thinking, communication, undergraduate research, and collaboration. However, individual instructors have a high degree of autonomy in how they structure and teach the course.

My first teaching of the course in the Fall of 2024 fortuitously coincided with Lafayette200, a nationwide bicentennial celebration of the Marquis de Lafayette’s return to the United States as the “Guest of the Nation” (1824-1825). As Aurélia Aubert explained in her 2018 Age of Revolutions article on “Challenging Lafayette’s Legacy,” President James Monroe and Congress invited Lafayette back to the United States to “repay him for his Revolutionary War service,” celebrate the General, and perform “an exercise in the shaping of public memory.” The ensuing celebrations, parades, and banquets, would “create national unity around a positive legacy of the American Revolution embodied by the old General.”

The Marquis de Lafayette (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Wanting to tap into the popular memory of the American Revolution and Lafayette himself, channel the commemorative zeitgeist around Lafayette200 (2024-2025), and connect the past to the present, I tasked my students with creating a collective StoryMap of Lafayette’s thirteen-day, 400-mile trek across Georgia. Students utilized the online KnightLab website so that they did not need to have any coding or geographic information system (GIS) skills to complete the assignment. As several recent studies have demonstrated that “digital technologies demonstrate substantial potential for enhancing history education, particularly in fostering student engagement and developing analytical capabilities,” my hope was that students could visualize results better, engage in active learning, and be more engaged in the class.

The pedagogical purpose of this mapping project was threefold. Firstly, it promoted critical thinking, communication, and collaboration (course LOs) and compelled students to conduct undergraduate research— a course LO and High Impact Practice (HIP). Yet, the format did not overwhelm non-History majors who had little to no experience with historical writing. Secondly, the GIS-centric nature of a StoryMap required students to grapple with the state-wide geography of the American Revolution and Lafayette’s 1825 visit, visually see how close Lafayette came to Columbus as he crossed the nearby Chattahoochee River, and, hopefully, realize that “elsewhere” was really “here.” Lastly, the assignment promoted discussions of history, memory, and commemoration, as we explored a multifaceted construction of the memory culture of the American Revolution. Lafayette’s tour strove to unite a nation dividing over politics, regional loyalties, and slavery while celebrating the “Spirit of ’76,” the legacy of the democratic experiment, and the surviving heroes of the war. Lafayette200 and the present America250 celebrations are a modern commemorative moment in which the United States celebrates its founding, questions its accomplishments, and critically analyzes the triumphs, failures, and uncomfortable truths of the nation’s past.

When I first introduced the assignment, students were shocked to learn that Lafayette had visited Georgia — and, in some cases, their hometowns. For many, their knowledge of Lafayette was limited to the lyrics of Hamilton:

“An immigrant, you know and love, who’s unafraid to step in
He’s constantly confusin’, confoundin’ the British henchmen
Ev’ryone give it up for America’s favorite fighting Frenchman
Lafayette!”

For others, he was a Revolutionary figure who fought elsewhere. Unlike the readers of Age of Revolutions, they did not know that Lafayette had returned and toured the United States in the 1820s.

To make the project manageable for students, I divided the class of 30 into six groups of 4-6 students. The groups’ foci centered on the key locations of Lafayette’s tour as they literally retraced Lafayette’s journey though Georgia. The groups were:

1. Introduction, Background, Context, and Conclusion
2. Savannah (Lafayette’s entry point into the state)
3. The journey and stops between Savannah and Milledgeville
4. Milledgeville (then, the capital of Georgia)
5. The journey and stops between Milledgeville and Fort Mitchell (where Lafayette entered Alabama)
6. Memory and Fake Markers

I introduced the class to the assignment during the first week of the semester, establishing it as one of two key research investigations of the course. Work on the project began in earnest after our discussion of the American Revolution and students read the New Georgia Encyclopedia entry on Lafayette’s visit. I then provided students with online copies of Auguste Levasseur’s Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825, Vol. 20 but otherwise left them to their own devices. Each group wrote five entries based on a total of 5+ primary sources (including Levasseur). Secondary sources were optional. I ensured that students had class time to work on the project, but students completed the bulk of the work outside of class.

Honestly, the results were mixed. The final StoryMap itself was informative—and a tangible project that outlives the course. Students surprised me with the details of Lafayette’s visit that they chose to highlight. A few emphasized Lafayette’s encounters with individual Georgians. The StoryMap format encouraged students to draft entries of about five sentences each and develop their synthesis and writing skills, but entries varied considerably in length. Frustratingly, I also believe that a few entries were based on AI-generated text.

Learning objectives were met; students did in fact develop and refine their research abilities. One student claimed that “it helped me sharpen my historical research skills by looking for primary sources that helped shape the storymap.” A few students revealed that they went down the research “rabbit hole,” and enjoyed the experience. Many claimed they struggled to find primary sources, further providing proof of their engagement with the research project. Secondly, students recognized that the project developed their critical thinking skills so that they were in the “Apply” and “Creating” Stages of Bloom’s Taxonomy; their post project reflections confirmed this. Thirdly, students connected the project to our overall class content. One argued that they “got a better idea of early Georgia geography.” Others, especially those researching Milledgeville, gained deeper knowledge of the former state capital. Impressively, students also made connections between Lafayette’s thirteen-day jaunt through Georgia with greater themes in the study of “the Age of Revolutions”: international perceptions of and relations with the United States, post-Revolution industrialization, Native American history, and the overall mythology of this era (especially given the number of “fake markers” in the area.)

Lastly, students did in fact develop their historical thinking skills. Following Nikki Mandel’s and Bobbie Malone’s “Thinking Like a Historian” model, students frequently argued that this assignment allowed them to see Lafayette’s visit “though their eyes”—to understand how 19th century Georgians understood their world and experienced key events. In a post-project reflection, one student called the experience “humbling.” Such comments reflected the hard work and perseverance of some students; as one revealed, this project encouraged him to “not [give] up and [go] for the easy way out.”

Unfortunately, the StoryMap software was a hurdle for students. To collect all the entries into a single map, I created a shared class Gmail account allowing all students to access and edit the same map at the same time. (The free software we used only allowed for one login email.) Unfortunately, as several students worked on the map simultaneously, several entries were not saved or updated properly. The class’s collective frustration grew as the final deadline loomed. At the last minute, I offered students the opportunity to submit their entries as PowerPoint (PPT) slides, but this resulted in the StoryMap data being in several different locations for me to find and piece together.

In retrospect, there were several things I think I could have done differently. Firstly, I wish I had devoted more time to brainstorming potential primary sources and where to find them; this would have better ensured that students went beyond newspapers, paintings, historical markers, and other easy-to-find online sources. We could have partnered with the CSU Special Collections and Archives to have a history research workshop so that students could have explored non-digital sources (published memoirs, letters, diaries, etc.) and sources available in our own collection. To reiterate the need for primary and secondary source research, I could have also asked students to include citations at the end of each entry rather than adding sources to a collective bibliography at the end of the map. Secondly, to avoid student frustrations and accidental overwrites of entries, in the future, I would just provide students with a PPT Template to complete entries and then piece the map together myself.

Unexpectedly, group dynamics proved more troublesome than expected. Most groups worked well but a few struggled with communication and division of workload. In the future, I will have students create a teamwork contract that outlines individual responsibilities and establishes a protocol for any potential communication issues or conflicts. I will also include a teamwork reflection to the overall assignment reflection.

While I would certainly refine things in the future, I found the StoryMap project to be an effective undergraduate research project. It (re)introduced them to historical and primary source research in a less intimidating format. It also reinforced the pivotal intersection of history and geography; by mapping travel routes, historic sites, and landmarks, students realized how intimately the American Revolution played out “here” in Georgia. They also had a visualization of the American Revolution’s commemorative landscape—both real and imagined—allowing them to see how the legacy of the Revolution has been remembered, falsified, and/or politicized. Ultimately, I think it’s important to remember that while this generation of students are learning in the era of Unessays, Learning Management Systems, and ChatGPT, they are not always as tech-savvy as we presume. To do this type of assignment, we need to devote more time and supervision than we may initially anticipate. Today’s students love hands-on, practical training and experiences though and StoryMaps are just one way to help them become the critical and historically focused thinkers we aspire them to be.

---

Dr. Laura June Davis is an Assistant Professor of History at Columbus State University. She earned a PhD at the University of Georgia and an MS in Curriculum and Instruction from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. Her teaching and research focus on American history through the long 19th century, with a specific emphasis on gender, military, and naval histories. A portion of her research on Confederate naval guerrillas can be found in The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War edited by Brian McKnight and Barton Myers (LSU Press, 2017).

Title Image: A Historical Marker from Massachusetts Tracing Lafayette’s Tour of the United States. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Further Reading:
Aubert, Aurélia. “Challenging Lafayette’s Legacy: Race and Republicanism in France and the United States.” Age of Revolutions. April 23, 201. https://ageofrevolutions.com/2018/04/23/challenging-lafayettes-legacy-race-and-republicanism-in-france-and-the-united-states/ .

Brookhiser, Richard. The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026.

Duval, Kathleen. Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution. New York: Random House, 2025.

Goff, John H. “Across Georgia with LaFayette,” Georgia Review 17, No 2 (Summer 1963): 193-205.

Keber, Martha L. “Marquis de Lafayette in Georgia.” New Georgia Encyclopedia. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/marquis-de-lafayette-in-georgia/ .

Levasseur, Auguste. Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825; or Journal of a Voyage to the United States, trans. John D. Godman. New York: Research Reprints, 1970.

Loveland, Anne C. Emblem of Liberty: The Image of Lafayette in the American Mind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.

Mandell, Nikki and Bobbie Malone. Thinking Like a Historian: Rethinking History Instruction. Madison. Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2007.