Welcome to the American Story. Mostly true stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one Gettysburg. The Great Civil War historian James McPherson tells a beautiful and true story about Gettysburg.

The year was 1976, and America was celebrating the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution.

This was still at the height of the Cold War, which is already ancient history to a generation of Americans. And a delegation of historians

from the Soviet Union was visiting the United States as a gesture of goodwill.

One of McPherson's colleagues on the history faculty at Princeton University, a historian of the

Revolution and early republic, was a host for the visiting Russian delegation.

When they arrived, he assumed that they would want to visit the usual

revolutionary war sites, like Independence Hall in Philadelphia,

or maybe Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts or Yorktown in Virginia.

But they made immediately clear that they wanted to go first to Gettysburg.

McPherson's faculty colleague was not just perplexed, but astonished.

He asked the visitors why they wanted to go to Gettysburg.

It had nothing to do with the American Revolution.

But the Russians, who would have been very carefully prepared by their government for such a visit,

understood their American history better than their American host.

Gettysburg, they said had everything to do with

the revolution. These Soviet historians seemed more familiar than their American

counterpart with Lincoln's Gettysburg address.

They knew that the opening words of the address, four score and seven years ago, referred

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