Heading north, Vito’s been on the road for hours. His cellphone rings; he throws it out the window. He has no idea where he is. His car breaks down. He makes it into the next town, finds an inn, puts his gun under his pillow.

The next day he wakes up in a little New Hampshire village, where gay people walk the streets without fear. In a diner, looks pass between Vito and the counterman. A male couple comes in, sits down, and begins speaking a language Vito has never before heard in the light of day, only in the dark. He’s confused: What does it mean to be in a place where, for the first time in your life, you might feel at home in your own skin? Could that even be right?

He goes into an antique shop. He picks up a vase, and the gay owner compliments him on his taste: “That’s the most expensive item in the store.” But then Vito sees something else, probably the cheapest thing in the store: an old New Hampshire license plate. “Live Free or Die,” reads the slogan across the top.

The phrase burns into Vito’s mind. You can see his face change. The words were written in 1809 by Gen. John Stark, a New Hampshire hero of the Revolutionary War, on the occasion of the 32nd reunion of veterans of the 1777 Battle of Bennington, Vt.; too ill to attend, Gen. Stark sent a toast. “Live free or die,” another man read for him: “Death is not the worst of evils.” The words echoed across the nation, down through the decades; in 1945, with the end of the Second World War, New Hampshire took the first four words and put them all over the state.

Vito stares. “Live Free or Die” — it’s as if the metal can talk. It’s just a license plate; for him it might as well be the Declaration of Independence, ringing its bell. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” Jefferson wrote — and suddenly, as it has for so many for so long, through that license plate the Declaration is speaking to Vito as if it were addressed to him. “Live free or die” — what if all this, the shock in his face says, was meant for him as much as anyone?

It’s one of those signal moments when the whole weight of the national story, its promises and its betrayals, hits home — leaving the citizen at once part of a community and completely alone. It doesn’t matter that, well, yes, of course, on the fourth of July, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was presented, everyone understood that all men meant men, not women; whites, not blacks; Christians, not Jews or Hindi or heathen; decent people, not Sodomites. The idea that “all men are created equal” was not a “self-evident truth,” Sen. John Pettit said on the floor of the Senate in 1853: it was “a self-evident lie.” It was in the midst of the debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act; Pettit was arguing for voiding the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and opening the territories to slavery. It was a debate: “The great declaration cost our forefathers too dear,” Sen. Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio replied to Pettit, “to be so lightly thrown away by their children.”

Abraham Lincoln read these debates from his oblivion in Springfield, Ill.; he was a 44-year-old lawyer who had served one term in Congress before being turned out of office. Pettit’s words and the words against him brought Lincoln back to the world. Soon he was speaking as if the Declaration of Independence contained all the words the nation ever needed to hear — and in a certain sense, it didn’t matter that Lincoln did not believe that, once men and women left the hand of their creator, they were equal on earth. “Pettit called the Declaration of Independence a lie,” Lincoln said in Peoria in 1854, answering a speech by Stephen Douglas. “If it had been said in old Independence Hall 78 years ago, the doorkeeper would have thrown him into the street.” That might have been a fairy tale; the Declaration of Independence itself might be a fairy tale, but not one that can be given an ending, happy or not. The charge in the Declaration was boundless; no limits placed upon it hold.

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — it’s what the rest of the world understands by America when America isn’t forcing the rest of the world to understand America as something else. “We are caught in a world of limits where there’s no such thing as the self-made man,” said a graduate student in France last week; Claire de la Vigne was speaking to a New York Times reporter about the French university system, where doors are made to be closed, not opened. “We are never taught the idea of the American dream, where everything is possible,” she said. It’s what Americans understand by America, when the facts of everyday American life somehow recede, and an idea of America takes their place.

Here’s a passage from “Enthusiasm,” a yet-to-be-published novel written by a friend of mine, Charlie Haas. A man — a scientist, a businessman — is trying to recover from brain damage. His father is trying to reintroduce him to time, place, names, faces.

Dad and Barney sat at the desk with the datebook open in front of them. “Okay,” Dad said, “what’s something you might have to do this afternoon?”

“Go to a meeting,” Barney said.

“Okay. So you write that in there.”

Barney scrawled MEETING over half the afternoon grid. “We’re going to have a country,” he said. “We have some farmers coming, and some horseshoe guys.”

“Like blacksmiths?” Dad said.

“Yes,” Barney said. “So we get liberty. And we wear wigs in the room.”

This doesn’t even have the weight of a fairy tale, or of a dream you can just barely remember — and yet it’s inescapable, and unbreakable.

There’s a way in which you can see every American story as a version of the Declaration of Independence: every story an attempt to make it true, or prove it a lie. In 1941, Henry Luce called the 20th century “the American century”; he meant this was the century when America became a colossus from which the rest of the world would have to step back, trembling with awe. But if that American century was truly American, you can almost see Lincoln reminding us — or, if not Lincoln, the doorkeeper at Independence Hall — then the story of the American century is the story of all sorts of previously excluded, marginalized, scorned, despised, ignored or enslaved people — laborers, women, African-Americans, Asian Americans, Jews, Latinos, gay men and women — entering into full citizenship and full participation in national life. If not full citizenship, a more complete citizenship than even Lincoln or the doorkeeper could in fact have imagined — as, again and again, decade after decade, those echoing words of the Declaration of Independence sounded as if for the first time.

It can be easy to forget this, when people on both the left and the right tell the story of the country as if it were a story of power, not speech — a story of the movements of money and armies, not the acts of men and women, acting alone or together.

This came home to me last week, at a meeting in Cambridge, Mass. A group of 16 people — distinguished historians, critics, poets, novelists, professors — sat around a table determining what would and what would not be included in an ambitious new book: a 1,000-page, 200 chapter “New Literary History of America.” “‘All God’s Dangers — The Life of Nate Shaw,’” one person said — and there was silence. Few people there had heard of the book; only three had read it.

The book appeared in 1975, and then it disappeared. Why? It won a National Book Award; it received reviews that were like trumpets. But somehow the tale told by Nate Shaw — the name the historian Theodore Rosengarten gave to one Ned Cobb, born in Alabama in 1885, dead there in 1973, who, over hundreds of hours, spun Rosengarten the story of his life — did not fit the American story as it was being reconstructed once again. This was a man whose parents were slaves, and who reveled in his superiority — in mind, body, will, desire, courage, and wit — over other men, be they black or white. “All men are created equal” — but what men and women become is not equal, and proving himself in that arena was America to Nate Shaw.

“I was climbin up in the world just like a boy climbin a tree. And I fell just as easy, too.” It’s 1931, in the heart of the Depression, and a banker is squeezing him:

“Bring me the cotton this fall, bring me the cotton.” When he told me that I got disheartened. I didn’t want him messin with me — still, I didn’t let him take a mortgage on anything I owned. I was my own man, had been for many years, and God knows I weren’t goin to turn the calendar back on myself.

You can hear it in the cadence, in the uniqueness of the speech: “I weren’t goin to turn the calendar back on myself.” This is someone for whom liberty is real — as real in its absence as when he can all but hold it in his hands. At 21, in 1906, Nate Shaw set out to raise his first cotton crop; in 1932 he stood for the Alabama Sharecroppers Union against a gang of sheriffs sent to take over a friend’s property, and paid for his stand with 12 years in prison; he found God. He walked out of prison. He lived a new life.

From his first day on his own, he was not someone who could be reduced to a type, a symbol, or made to stand for a cause. Against all odds he had in fact achieved what the country promised him: “life,” on his own terms; “liberty,” seized, acted out, taken from him; “the pursuit of happiness” — which, at the end of his life, meant firing a revolver in the air. “I shoots it some times just to see if it will yet answer me,” he said. “I throw it to the air and ask for all six shots: YAW YAW YAW YAW YAW YAW.” The story came off the pages with suspense, order, clarity, and drama, as if Shaw had long before determined not to quit this life without leaving a piece of his own behind.

His own — all he had, to pass on to whoever might stumble upon the now-forgotten book made of his particular pursuit of happiness. But if the historians gathered to choose the books of our history had not heard of Nate Shaw — and, hearing his story, they finally chose to fold it into the story they themselves were trying to tell — if they hadn’t heard of Nate Shaw, in a certain way, Vito, standing in that New Hampshire antique store, was hearing Nate Shaw speak as he read the words on the license plate.

As Vito read “Live Free or Die,” a song began to come up on the soundtrack: a song called “4th of July,” recorded in 1987 by the Los Angeles punk band X. It’s thrilling, and it’s heartbreaking; a couple’s marriage is falling apart, but it’s the Fourth of July. The feeling is that by failing their marriage they are betraying the country: “We gave up trying so long ago.”

Can Jefferson save their marriage? Can they save the country? Like “The Sopranos,” the song doesn’t say yes or no — it makes the question real, makes it yours.

All this makes Roth’s latest novel, “The Plot Against America,” doubly surprising. The book’s premise — what happens to the Roth family of Newark, N.J., when Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and America descends into an orgy of anti-Semitism — is an embrace of the catastrophic anxieties Roth once rebelled against. He envisions the kind of America where, like it or not, he is a Jew first. But equally unexpected is the novel’s credibility: By setting it in a wholly imaginary history, Roth has paradoxically managed to write his most believable book in years.

Roth’s feelings of persecution have been the engine of much of his fiction, and for his readers it’s always a complicated balancing act: Is the thrill of being swept up in his stormy wrath worth the suspension of common sense that’s often required? The tirade about the Monica Lewinsky scandal that kicks off “The Human Stain,” for example, has a certain Swiftian magnificence, but as a description of what happened in America in 1998 it is dead wrong. The nation was not caught up in a puritanical witch hunt; rather, Americans largely refused to be whipped into such a frenzy, in defiance of the best efforts of right-wingers and certain media figures. (Wallowing in a gleefully smutty gossip-fest about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s private lives is another matter — that’s still going on, to judge from the covers of supermarket tabloids.)

Sexual persecution is the specter that really winds Roth’s watch, but in an era of gay marriage and openly polyamorous households, it’s hard to find a situation in which a heterosexual male of conventional proclivities can feel truly ostracized as a result of his sexuality. As a result, Roth has had to contrive some pretty preposterous scenarios, populated by an assortment of straw-man oppressors, in order to maneuver his main characters into a position in which they can be unjustly tormented. You can see all the strings and gears here, as in “The Human Stain,” in which Coleman Silk is given a wife solely so that she can be hounded unto death by a university’s administration and thus provide sufficient justification for Silk’s foaming hatred of that administration.

With “The Plot Against America,” we’re asked to believe something far more dramatic: that our country could, under the right circumstances and under the influence of powerful demagogues, degenerate into hate-stoked rioting on the level of Nazi Germany’s notorious Kristallnacht. Yet — a dismal thought — this is more plausible than the propositions Roth has been presenting us with lately. Roth’s handling of the story is sober, considered and subdued, another surprise. Roth’s fire-and-brimstone eloquence has hypnotized many a reader who might, in a less persuasive fictional climate, reject the paranoid fantasies he concocts. Here, where the threat is real (however speculative the “history” may be), he has abandoned his fury.

For “The Plot Against America” is a book about fear. “Fear” is the very first word in it, and for Roth fear is the natural companion of love, the secondary subject of the novel. The book is a tribute to his parents, Herman and Bess, and the tender order and fierce integrity of the life they created for their two sons, Sandy and Philip, in mid-20th century Newark. Roth seems unaware of the vast and lively fictional genre of alternate history, but this novel belongs to the small subset of it that is less interested in the unfolding of global events than in the way those events affect the most intimate experiences of the people who live through them.

From the moment Lindbergh offers himself as a Republican candidate opposed to intervention in the war in Europe, he becomes the villain of the Roth household. This puts Herman at odds with such rich, assimilated Jews as Rabbi Bengelsdorf, a Newark macher renowned for his public speaking, horsemanship and “several books of inspirational poetry routinely given as gifts to bar mitzvah boys and newlyweds.” Bengelsdorf is a marvelous creation, part object lesson in the perils of collaboration and part meticulous parody of self-important men everywhere: “‘Newark has the best drinking water in the world,’ the rabbi said, and said it as he would say everything, with deep consideration.”

But while the desperate rabbis of Europe might have cooperated with the Nazis in hope of somehow lessening or managing the devastation awaiting their communities, Bengelsdorf is merely a fool. Like everyone else in the novel, he’s in thrall to a notion of America; the novel’s most ferocious battles ultimately boil down to a collision of contradictory Americas. For the rabbi and his “wealthy, urbane, self-assured” friends, America is their own success story, in which they, the tiny first generation of Jews to attend Ivy League colleges, “mingled with the non-Jews, whom they subsequently associated with in communal, political and business endeavors and who sometimes appeared to accept them as equals.”

To the Roths, America is the set of constitutional and governmental protections that allows them to live unmolested in Jewish neighborhoods. What they share with their neighbors is not a particularly Jewish culture but simply a blessed relief from the prejudice that, anywhere else, made them feel like outsiders. “It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbors for me far more than religion,” Roth writes — and there is a powerful sense that the neighborhood and family depictions here are largely autobiographical. “Nobody in the neighborhood had a beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap either outside or in the houses.”

Philip and his family know they are Jews, and that this threatens to set them apart (early in the novel, Herman rejects a promotion that would require moving to a gentile neighborhood), but they identify as Americans. Philip, “steeped in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson,” revels in the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, and finds the bearded stranger who goes door-to-door collecting donations to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine bewildering. “We’d already had a homeland for three generations … Our homeland was America.”

Lindbergh’s presidency splits the Roth family. Bess’ sister, Evelyn, marries Rabbi Bengelsdorf, who is appointed by Lindbergh to direct the Office of American Absorption. They lure Philip’s older brother, Sandy, into an OAA program with the sinisterly wholesome title of Just Folks. Just Folks sends urban children to heartland farms for the summer, with the ostensible aim of “encouraging America’s religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society.” Sandy becomes a partisan of Evelyn’s view that “the greatest fear of a Jew like her brother-in-law was that his children might escape winding up as narrow-minded and frightened as he was.”

Sandy and the Bengelsdorfs are woefully mistaken about the ultimate ends of the OAA, but until its true nature emerges, they espouse many of the same ideas Roth himself has voiced. You could see “The Plot Against America” as an act of contrition, a concession allowing that the fears of his parents’ generation represented, if not a present reality, then at least a potential one. In other words, it can happen here. The Jews of Newark are always merely a step away from panic, dogged by “an atavistic sense of being undefended that had more to do with Kishinev and the pogroms of 1903 than with New Jersey 37 years later.” Previously, like Sandy, Roth called this paranoia. But in this novel, Newark’s Jews are not so terribly off the mark.

The young Philip Roth in “The Plot Against America” is a child who has soaked up the ambient fear around him and attached it to everything from the cellar (haunted, he thinks) to the cousin who returns from fighting with the Canadian army against Hitler minus a leg. He cherishes his stamp collection, which somehow comes to stand for all the American ideals he and his family are about to see shattered. (Later on, his mother will urge his father not to send a letter to the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who has become the most outspoken opponent of the Lindbergh administration, because someone might intercept it. “Never. Not the U.S. Mail,” Herman replies.) Philip has a recurring nightmare that his series of stamps showing national parks have been overprinted with swastikas, and that the presidents’ faces have been replaced with Hitler’s.

Much of “The Plot Against America” consists of the child Philip’s relatively ordinary boyhood experiences — adventures with a mischievous friend, efforts to decipher the mysteries of the adult world, the slow revelation that his parents are mere human beings, and the trials of having to play with a geeky family friend, a boy to whom Philip will ultimately do a terrible wrong. The voice is an adult’s, but not intrusively so. And meanwhile, underneath it all, the hum of menace grows louder and louder, until the disaster stalking Philip’s America becomes indistinguishable from the routine disasters of growing up, and then suddenly eclipses them.

The novel’s hero is Herman Roth, an insurance salesman who lacks the killer instincts of his entrepreneurial brothers. This leaves him more vulnerable to the anti-Semitic machinations of the government, and sometimes the book feels like a defense of him to a younger version of Roth who mistakenly saw Herman as weak. The uncles and other Jewish businessmen in “The Plot Against America” crackle and leap from the page — the passages about them have the immediate feel of stories traded across the dining room table, full of rants and jokes and gestures, full of life. By contrast, the modest, industrious Herman might seem bland.

The nightmare of the Lindbergh presidency becomes, for Roth the novelist, a way of applying a brutal pressure to his father and mother, an experiment that reveals, in extremis, their true worth. At the moment of greatest crisis, each of them is called upon to act, and each shows the clarity of genuine courage, mobilized by their most deeply held ideals. “There were two kinds of strong men,” Roth writes, “those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinham, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.”

But while “The Plot Against America” concedes (after a fashion; the book has a rather gratuitous “secret” revealed at the end) that the rise of a murderously anti-Semitic regime is possible, even in the U.S., it is not his Jewishness that spurs Herman Roth’s defiance of that regime, but his Americanness. Roth has not strayed so far from his old ways after all. To be Jews, for Herman and his friends, is “neither a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be ‘proud’ of.” It is rather “in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it.” To insist on a place in this country no matter what the “nature of things” might be, this, for Herman Roth, and eventually for his son Philip, is to be American.

It’s a complex exhibit and one that does not gloss over the existence of slavery. But its underlying narrative on that disgraced institution is simple: Yes, many slaves opposed slavery and fled North at the first chance, but other slaves, whose voices have been lost to history, did not. They included “some black Confederates, and not just slave laborers, but men who actually through their own free will supported the Confederate cause,” says John Coski, the museum’s historian.

It is the kind of observation certain to leave many people incredulous. Among them is former Gov. Doug Wilder, a Democrat who at 71 is old enough to be the grandson of slaves. When Wilder hears such sentiments — and they are not entirely rare in modern Richmond, the capital of the Old South — it reinforces his conviction that Virginia, and the entire nation, need a museum of American slavery to fully comprehend the institution’s complexities.

“Let me tell you something,” he says in a low, steady voice. “When Grant was coming toward Richmond, they [the slaves] were told that the Northerners were going to kill them all — masters and everyone else. My grandfather became so frightened that he hid in a silo and almost suffocated to death. He was rescued by Northern troops. My point is that for them to put that on display now is counterproductive and it will hurt any reconciliation … That’s why it’s so necessary for the slavery museum to exist. To tell it as it is, unbiased.”

Wilder’s idea, somewhere between a dream and a firm plan at this point, is to help resolve the still open wounds of slavery by confronting them head-on and at a $200 million National Slavery Museum on the banks of the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg, Va. Sitting in his office at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he’s a professor of public policy, Wilder talks about how he believes such a museum will do more than preserve the artifacts of the slave trade. It will show the grim facts of how slavery shaped the nation — and how it haunts the American dream.

“The slavery museum, in brief, should be able to cause people to reassess their attitudes about human beings, particularly about human beings of color,” Wilder says. “If it does not, then perhaps nothing will.”

One hundred and 40 years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the United States, and the South in particular, still struggle with slavery’s vestiges. Late last year, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott was forced to step down from his post as Senate majority leader after making remarks perceived as wistful for the days of racial segregation. Georgia’s new governor, Republican Sonny Perdue, was tripped up this spring by his 2002 campaign promise to bring back the state’s former flag, which from 1956 until 2001 incorporated the Confederate battle emblem. In the end, Perdue reached a compromise with state legislators and agreed to let voters decide next year whether to keep the current flag or adopt a new one based on the Confederate “Stars and Bars” with the added motto In God We Trust. And last month, there were heated protests in Richmond over placing a statue of Lincoln and Lincoln’s son Tad at Richmond’s historic Tredegar Iron Works, where cannons for the Confederate Army were forged.

All these incidents tell a part of the same troubling story: The Civil War has long been over, but even now slavery remains a ghost that time alone has not banished from the American conscience.

Wilder recognizes some Americans may not want to unearth slavery’s past. The sad truth is that the United States, to a large extent, was built by slave labor and its history as a nation was shaped by slavery. A convincing case can be made that, if not for slavery, the U.S. might not be the world power it is today. In that sense, slavery has indisputably shaped and influenced every American’s life. Yet, because it affronts our sense of our country’s idealistic precepts that “all men are created equal,” and because it creates in both blacks and whites a deep sense of shame, we’re reluctant to talk about it, let alone build a museum that commemorates the enslavement of other human beings.

Wilder envisions his National Slavery Museum examining, as he puts it, “the roots and fruits” of the slave culture, from its beginnings in the late 15th century off the African coast through modern times. It will show the history of the African slave trade, where tribes sold other tribes to European traders, but also educate visitors about the slaves’ lives: their origins, their languages, their religions, their customs, as well as their contributions to American life. Wilder sees the museum as an educational center, complete with an auditorium, lecture halls, research offices, a library, exhibition space, a repository for artifacts and documents, a full-scale reproduction of a slave ship, and a bookstore. He envisions millions of tourists to Virginia and Washington making the detour to Fredericksburg.

However harmless Wilder’s effort seems in the early 21st century, it is sure to provoke renewed controversy over the Civil War — and slavery’s legacy — in a place where the dominant culture views the past through a lens of romance and denial. There’s no dispute that slavery is a part of the history of the North and the South. But slavery cannot be discussed without delving into the antebellum South’s role in perpetuating and expanding it westward, and the Confederacy’s stalwart defense of it.

For some Southerners, especially the Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose modest membership of 35,000 belies its formidable political clout, that’s simply not acceptable.

“If Douglas Wilder plans on telling the whole story of slavery, then it’ll be good,” says Bragdon “Brag” Bowling, commander of the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “If not, it’ll be more of the same: trying to demonize Southerners and leaving out Northern shipping merchants and the blacks who turned over other tribes to the Dutch and the English slaver traders. I’m concerned that the Southerner will be the bad guy in this and it was a whole lot more than that.”

In some respects, it is remarkable that the United States doesn’t have a museum dedicated to slavery, an institution that endured close to 250 years in this country. The first African slaves arrived in Jamestown, Va., in 1619, a year before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth. By the time of the Civil War in 1861, there were roughly 31.4 million Americans and 4.4 million of them, or 14 percent, were African-Americans. Of those, 4 million were slaves in the South. Almost one-third of all Southern families owned slaves.

The first national African-American memorial was proposed in 1915, 52 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves. A group of aging black Civil War veterans pushed for a “Negro Memorial” to commemorate African-American contributions. In 1929, Congress authorized a museum to be built in the capital. Intended to be a neo-classical edifice, similar to the U.S. Supreme Court, the memorial was never to be. That same year the stock market crashed, ushering in the Great Depression, so plans were scuttled. By the time World War II ended, the museum had been forgotten, and more than half a century would pass before Congress seriously considered it again.

In January, Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., reintroduced a bill to build a slavery memorial in Washington. It has since been referred to the House Committee on Resources. Slavery, says Wilder, is “the untold history of America.” But while he waits to build his museum, slavery’s story in the United States is already being told — in a way that he and many other Americans would hardly recognize.

The Museum of the Confederacy was founded in 1890 by a group of Richmond society ladies who wanted to preserve Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ house as well as enshrine Confederate artifacts and records. The Sons of Confederate Veterans group was founded six years later, and today sees as its mission “the vindication of the Cause for which we fought.” The group’s Web site proclaims Confederate soldiers fought for “the preservation of liberty and freedom” and “personified the best qualities of America.”

When Col. J.A. Barton Campbell, a retired Army Reserve colonel and a member of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, became the museum’s director in February 2002, one of his first acts was to place the Confederate battle emblem alongside the other flags in front of the museum. He also cut the staff by 20 percent, and soon afterward former museum employees were quoted anonymously in the Richmond Times-Dispatch saying they feared flying the rebel flag was a sign that the museum would begin to embrace a more pro-Southern stance on the War Between the States.

If true, it will mark a dramatic change. Over the last four decades, the Museum of the Confederacy has tried to transform itself from a memorial to the Confederacy to a more mainstream museum of Confederate history. It hasn’t been an easy, or entirely successful, evolution. Even in the late 1980s, at the same time Wilder was running for governor, the museum still told the story of slavery from a distinctly Confederate point of view. At the entrance of the main exhibit, a plaque explained that some Southerners referred to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression, a conflict between the Jeffersonian, agrarian ideals of the South and the industrial interests of the North. What scant discussion there was of slavery and its role in Southern life was presented in the best possible light.

One display showed a worn cat-o’-nine-tails with the explanation that although some slave owners whipped their slaves with such devices, most were kind. Displaying that one slave whip outraged unreconstructed Southerners and, of course, the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The rest of the world may be anti-Confederate, they contend, but their museum should provide an untarnished image of the proud and honorable Confederacy. And slavery, especially when slaves are being beaten, ruins that portrayal.

The Sons of the Confederate Veterans were up in arms again a few years later, in 1991, when the museum, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, presented a vast show on slavery, “Before Freedom Came,” with artifacts and documents from roughly 90 private and public collections. By examining slavery, critics thought the museum had — once again — betrayed its Confederate heritage. That’s why they welcomed Campbell’s decision to fly the Confederate battle flag: Maybe the museum was finally getting back to its roots.

“If the museum can’t present a good presentation of the Confederate States of the America, who can?” Bowling asks. “That’s what they’re there for.”

On a bright day earlier this year, posters for the upcoming Civil War movie, “Gods and Generals” hung near the museum’s entrance. The movie, starring Robert Duvall as Gen. Robert E. Lee and featuring a cameo appearance by Ted Turner as a rebel soldier, depicts the early years of the Civil War — from the Southern perspective. Indeed, “Gods and Generals” used 7,500 Civil War re-enactors, who supplied their own period uniforms and weapons, for the battle scenes. In a review, the New York Times said the three-and-a-half-hour movie “goes out of its way to follow the example of ‘Gone With the Wind’ in sanitizing the South’s treatment of African Americans. Its one-sided vision shows freed and about-to-be-freed slaves cleaving to their benign white masters and loyally serving the Confederate Army.”

With such a wistful vision of the Civil War and slavery, “Gods and Generals” could fit unobtrusively into the museum’s current presentations. The museum’s main exhibit is called “The Confederate Years: The Southern Military in the Civil War,” and it doesn’t shirk from discussing slavery’s role in the South’s war effort. But the perspective is decidedly Confederate: Even the brief overview of the reasons for the South’s secession from the Union, at the beginning exhibit, presents the Civil War as more of a disagreement over states’ rights than as an ideological difference over the institution of owning human beings.

“Lincoln’s Republican Party,” it says, “opposed the expansion of slavery and the enforcement of the Constitutional requirement to return slaves to their owners.” And that, it goes on to say, was “an act hostile to the South’s interests.”

Step around the corner and the exhibit goes on to give a fairly rousing justification for why Southerners eagerly donned gray uniforms, drawing parallels with the revolutionary American colonists taking up arms against the British. “Confederate soldiers were fighting a ‘Second American Revolution’ for the rights and liberties that their forefathers had won in the first American Revolution,” says one placard. “Among these rights was the right to own slaves, a right sanctioned by the Constitution and by custom — even though the vast majority of the Confederate soldiers did not own slaves.”

The exhibit also talks about how the Confederate military enlisted African-Americans to build fortifications and serve the army. While it mentions that many Southern states and the Confederate government forced blacks — slave and free — into the military, it also highlights African-Americans who were loyal to the Confederacy. It talks about free blacks in the South forming militias to aid the Confederate cause. (Their offer was refused.) And it looks at slaves who stood by their masters. One such faithful slave was Marlboro Jones, owned by Capt. Randal F. Jones. Under his portrait, a description tells how Jones brought his master home to Savannah after he was mortally wounded on the battlefield. A visitor is left with the impression that African-Americans weren’t all that dissatisfied with slavery. The museum’s newest exhibit, “The Confederate Nation,” will probably not discourage that perception.

Coski, the museum’s historian, is proud that the new show does not depict slavery in stereotypical terms. “African-Americans would be loath to admit that any slave would be loyal to the Confederates,” he says. “And the Sons of the Confederate Veterans and activists would swear up and down that the absence of any slave rebellion shows that slaves were fundamentally loyal to the South.”

The truth, Coski says, lies somewhere in the middle. Though there were no slave uprisings in the South during the Civil War, he points out that about 500,000 African-Americans out of a total of 4 million fled north of the Mason-Dixon line, representing the largest migration in U.S. history. Obviously, he says, that debunks the Confederate myth that content slaves supported the Confederacy. “Hundreds of thousands didn’t act as loyal to the homeland,” Coski says. “They took the first opportunity to go to the North.”

On the other hand, the exhibit will display artifacts and documents showing some African-Americans, slaves and freemen, did indeed back the Confederacy. “It would be illogical and downright patronizing to think that 4 million African-Americans all reacted and behaved in the same way to something like the Civil War,” Coski says. “We will also have artifacts that speak to the stereotypical slaves that buried the silver or protected the master and mistress from the Union Army.”

Wilder himself wouldn’t recognize the need for a slavery museum until 1992, when, as Virginia’s governor — and the first elected black governor in U.S. history — he led a state trade mission to Africa and visited Goree Island, off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Goree was a central trading post for the early slave trade. Untold millions of Africans passed through island’s so-called Door of No Return. While no hard numbers exist, it’s estimated that traders shipped between 10 million and 28 million Africans overseas. Packed tight in ships with little food and water, more than 2 million of them are thought to have died during the crossing known as the Middle Passage on their way to the Americas and the Caribbean. Wilder’s trip to Goree carried great symbolic significance and a deep personal resonance. After leaving the dark, oppressive museum angry and dejected, he was determined to have America confront its own slave past.

Today, the benign depictions of slavery and “happy slaves” like the one at the Museum of the Confederacy reaffirm his belief that a museum solely devoted to slavery must be built in this country. True, slavery has been abolished in the United States for almost 138 years (slaves in Texas finally heard they were free on June 19, 1865), but it had flourished for nearly 250 years before that. It fueled the U.S. economy and shaped its political discourse. It was the single greatest affront to the ideals articulated at the nation’s founding, and it remains a source of profound conflict and alienation in a racially mixed society. Few people, he insists, understand the degree to which slavery and its aftermath still cast a shadow over American culture.

And yet, where African nations such as Senegal and Ghana, and even the small Caribbean island, Curaçao, have slave museums, the United States does not. This country has a national museum on the Washington Mall to commemorate the Holocaust, a profound global tragedy, but one that occurred in Europe.

To Wilder, it’s striking that it seems easier for Americans to confront the shameful history of Nazi-sponsored genocide. “None of it ever happened here, none of it,” he says. “To the extent that Jews were persecuted here, they were persecuted along with African-Americans. There was anti-Semitism, anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-anything in terms of people who weren’t the true bloods. I want to show that there aren’t any true bloods in America. I don’t want to talk about what was good and what was bad and who was right and who was wrong. I want to lay out the facts, so you can tell the story for yourself.”

Wilder hasn’t been the only one to contemplate a museum devoted to slavery themes. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, set to open in 2004, will tell the story of roughly 100,000 slaves who escaped from the South in the 1800s, aided by abolitionists who spirited them from one safe house to another, until they were in the North.

And for almost a year, a presidential commission has been looking into building a National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. President George W. Bush signed legislation in December 2001 to appropriate $2 million for a commission to study the idea. After a series of town meetings around the country, the panel delivered a 122-page report to Congress on April 1, calling for a museum to be built next to the reflecting pool in front of the Capitol. Inevitably, slavery would be a major theme for that museum, says George McDonald, the commission’s director and its liaison with Department of the Interior’s National Parks Service.

“Slavery was the American Holocaust,” McDonald says. “That’s just my own opinion and it needs to be shown in that light. It will show the comprehensive human tragedy. From the Middle Passage where Africans were brought over here on top of each other to when they came here to be branded. We will deal with the whole. But we will deal with slavery in the true form. It won’t be sugarcoated.”

McDonald would like to get initial funding of $45 million for the museum in the 2004 federal budget. The total cost is expected to reach $400 million. With half that amount expected to come from a federal government already contending with the unknown costs of rebuilding Iraq as well as with soaring budget deficits, the project faces long odds in the near term. Yet, Claudine Brown, co-chair of the commission, insists that budget constraints shouldn’t deter federal officials. Congress “has exercised its will to create several other museums in the nation’s capital, whether there were wars, or pestilence, or seven-year locusts,” she says. “There is no viable reason why this museum should not be authorized. I think we have waited much too long.”

Wilder, meanwhile, staunchly believes that the country needs a museum dedicated to slavery — and only slavery. “Slavery is just so big,” Wilder says. “It’s too big to be compartmentalized. It’s the untold story of America: slavery. If you know where it’s been told, tell me.”

It’s been more than a decade since Wilder first proposed building a museum and it’ll be another four years before he expects to have it completed in 2007. One reason it has taken him so long to get his museum off the ground is that he’s been extremely careful in choosing the site. It had to be in Virginia. This is where slavery began in 1619, in Jamestown; it’s where Thomas Jefferson lived, he who owned slaves and yet penned the words “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence; where Wilder’s ancestors were kept as slaves; where major, and bloody, battles of the Civil War were fought; where capital of the Confederacy was located; and where Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Virginia marks slavery’s beginning in this country and its end.

After returning from his Africa trip in 1992, Wilder spent the next 10 years searching for a suitable location here. Before he started raising money from corporations and individuals, recruiting curators and museum experts, and collecting artifacts and records from private owners and other institutions, Wilder wanted land. As a seasoned politician who never lost an election in almost a quarter of a century, he saw securing the property as a way to retain control over the museum’s creation and therefore, a way to ensure its eventual success. Worried that internal squabbling would derail the project, Wilder wanted to limit the number of people involved early on.

“One of the things I’ve tried to do is keep things tight, so we don’t have political infighting,” he explains. “That comes, trust me, that comes with growth of anything … You have to understand the infighting. There’s so much of it. God have mercy. Who’s going to run this? Why should they run that?”

Jamestown was Wilder’s first choice. But after five years negotiating with the land’s owners, a fundamentalist Christian Pentecostal church, he gave up. (Church leaders were dead set against any tobacco or alcohol on the property, even at receptions and parties.) After his search in Richmond led down a few other dead ends, Larry Silver, a commercial developer and a longtime friend, offered him land in Fredericksburg, about 50 miles from Washington and 50 miles from Richmond. As soon as Wilder saw Silver’s parcel, he knew it was the right spot.

Almost 39 acres, the undeveloped wooded site is on a bluff overlooking the Rappahannock River near I-95. Last year, Silver deeded the landwith an estimated value of $20 million to $30 million — to the National Slavery Museum. When completed, the museum will be part of Silver’s larger 2,400-acre development, Celebrate Virginia, which will encompass stores, corporate offices and three golf courses.

Some local critics have questioned the propriety of placing a museum so near commercial property, but Wilder dismisses those concerns. There is enough land to separate it from the stores and offices, he says. Now, with the land secured, Wilder is turning his attention to planning and building the museum. He estimates it will cost $200 million to complete, but he expects it to be built in stages, as funds are available. So far, the National Slavery Museum has $1 million from Fredericksburg and another $1 million from the state. By year’s end, Wilder wants the board to have a plan in place to raise funds from corporate and individual donors.

That campaign may be a challenge, especially in the current economy. But he and others are optimistic. From planning to its opening in 1993, it took 15 years for the Holocaust Museum to be built. Congress authorized the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum for the American Indian in 1989. That museum’s new building on the Capitol Mall won’t open until September 2004 — again, 15 years later.

In Cincinnati, the Underground Railroad Freedom Center formed in 1994 and began fundraising in the fall of 1999. It has received $91 million in pledges toward its $110 million goal, and expects to open in 2004. Sixty percent of the funds came from individual and corporate donors. Given that the center was able to raise its funding in a relatively small amount of time, Ernest Britton, the center’s spokesman, says Wilder may be able to raise the funds necessary to open a portion of his slavery museum within four years.

“Absolutely, it’s possible,” Britton says. “It’s going to be based on the contacts and the relationships that they are able to establish with donors around the country and how concrete their plans are. People want to see something concrete. We didn’t have artifacts, but we had a schematic and conceptual plan.”

Though he doesn’t have much capital, Wilder has already attracted a distinguished architect for the project: Chien Chung Pei, founder of Pei Partnership Architects in New York City and son of the legendary architect I.M. Pei. At his father’s firm, the younger Pei was the designer in charge of the glass pyramid entrance at the Louvre in Paris and the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington. He has already shown Wilder preliminary renderings for a slavery museum: a modern structure with a glass gallery at the center with rectangular buildings on the sides and elongated terraces. (Wilder rejected another architect’s design that would have had two glass towers — one with gray panes and the other with dark blue — linked together with large symbolic chains.)

“The [slavery] museum is important for this country,” says Pei, who contacted Wilder after reading about his project. “Slavery is a story which should be told, but it’s important that it be told in the right way, told in a way that helps unite our country more so than to divide it. When you hear statements coming out of people like Trent Lott, you realize some people aren’t living in the 20th century, let alone the 21st. There is a deep-seated misunderstanding about a lot of things having to do with race. I think this museum, by educating people, can overcome a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of ignorance. Maybe I’m being too generous, but I think that ignorance plays a big role in that. But I’m just an architect.”

Wilder isn’t discouraged that after 10 years of his quest to build a slavery museum, he has neither committed donors nor a trove of slave artifacts, records and documents. With a scant $2 million and 4o acres of land in hand, he is confident that some portion of the National Slavery Museum will open to the public in four years — in time for the 400-year anniversary of the settlement of Virginia.

“We’re going to build the museum,” he says matter-of-factly. “Nothing is going to stop us.” Wilder firmly believes that if the United States doesn’t confront its history, in its entirety, then it will never live up to its potential. “This is what [Martin Luther] King was saying: America should live up to its precepts,” he says. “The more we learn about slavery, the more we learn that we haven’t lived up to our creed, the more we learn that we fostered a situation that divides and separates, that we have sanctioned a system that discriminates against human beings, that declassifies human beings … The story here is that America was founded on precepts which were never fulfilled. Opportunity, or recognition of these precepts, is ours if we take advantage of it. If we don’t, something obviously will happen to the fabric of our society. Rather than become closer, it’ll unravel. And no one wants that.”

Focusing here on his hometown of Oakland, Calif., he portrays a city haunted by racial nightmare. The Ohlone Indians made this land their home until they were devastated by white settlers late in the 19th century. Midway through the next century, the right-wing Knowland family ruled by publishing the Oakland Tribune and sending William Knowland to the U.S. Senate, where he was majority leader under President Eisenhower. As the city grew steadily blacker in the ’60s and whites fled to the suburbs, Oakland spawned Huey P. Newton and the Black Panthers.

Malcomson observed much of this as a child. His mother and father, a homemaker and a Baptist minister, were white liberals active in the civil rights movement. His hero was local boy Jack London, writer of adventure tales, socialist advocate and, Malcomson belatedly discovered, chest-thumping racist. During boyhood, Malcomson’s pals were a remarkably diverse bunch, but as he moved into junior high he and his black friends began to drift apart. More and more, he hung out with Chinese boys, practiced martial arts and idolized Bruce Lee. “I suspect I chose Chineseness,” he writes, “in hopes of keeping my denial and acceptance of race in suspension.”

But eventually there was no denying his “becoming white,” with all its implicit privileges. As an adult poking around in his genealogy, he learned that some of his ancestors were slaveholders and that one mixed-race relative, if she chose, could claim membership in both the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Cherokee nation.

The enigma of race viewed through the microcosm of Malcomson’s Oakland is fresh and instructive. The ultimate subject is never the author himself but the light his experience sheds on us all.

Given these California origins and current American demography, it’s surprising that Malcomson did not include Asians in so wide-ranging and ambitious a history. Perhaps he found the prospect too daunting. But without this perspective, there’s no way the book can be considered what he apparently wishes it to be: a definitive accounting of the construction of American racial reality.

Oddly enough, Oklahoma rather than Oakland is the book’s fulcrum. At the turn of the last century Oklahoma was a “laboratory of separatism” where blacks, whites and Indians each sought and failed to set up independent states: “One sought to go beyond race by escaping the reminders of one’s own racialness, to ‘separate’ in order to become fully oneself and free. It was already too late. The history of the New World’s three-part racial division stuck to Americans like a burr.” The choice certainly suits Malcomson’s additional theme of racial separatism as impossible dream, even as he admits that the state is “an extreme example.”

Malcomson’s treatment of Indians centers on the Cherokees. Their often-told story is heart-wrenching. No matter how much they became assimilated, educated and Christianized, they were going to be driven from their homelands and “removed” to Oklahoma, no matter what the cost in Cherokee lives and shattered culture. Casino-gambling wealth among the various tribes in our time he regards as obscene hush money intended to quiet the American conscience.

As the author traverses centuries of black-white relations, paradox is the key. By defending Caribbean Indians from Spanish exploitation, the 16th century Dominican friar Bartolome de Las Casas unwittingly cleared the way for black slavery. During the American Revolution, the founding fathers’ rhetoric of liberty clarified the equation of slavery with blacks only. In our time, the segregated black church became the decisive social institution championing an integrated society. All telling points, but none is original.

The book’s organization is unorthodox if not downright infuriating. To say that it tried my patience to slog twice through much the same material doesn’t quite capture my desperate longing to fling this book across the room. In the section titled “The Republic of New Africa,” Malcomson covers slavery, abolitionism and colonization, the Civil War, black codes, Jim Crow segregation, civil rights and Black Power. In “White Flight” he runs through the three centuries again, with only slight variations of emphasis.

Not only is it repetitious, but this misbegotten scheme fails to provide needed context. Take Abraham Lincoln, for example. The Great Emancipator’s views on race, sketchy the first time, come into perspective only with the broader analysis Malcomson provides when he circles around again. Likewise for white theories of racial hierarchy, for black debates on integration vs. separatism and on and on. And any book on the American racial dilemma that reduces W.E.B. DuBois to little more than a footnote is scandalously deficient.

Malcomson is most astute when analyzing culture. His insights into minstrel shows, the Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris and the relationship between blues culture and the ’20s Harlem Renaissance are sharp-eyed and unexpected. Unfortunately, they play a small role in a book that resembles nothing so much as the graphic art of M.C. Escher. Circling endlessly, you can’t tell where one of his drawings starts or stops.

In Malcomson’s case, you want it to stop.

After almost 15 years and hundreds of letters and interviews, Brokaw wrote “The Greatest Generation,” a representative cross-section of the stories he came across. This collection is more than a mere chronicle of a tumultuous time, it is a history made personal by a cast of everyday people transformed by extraordinary circumstances: the first women to break the homemaker mold, minorities suffering countless indignities to boldly fight for their country, infantrymen who went on to become some of the most distinguished leaders in the world, small-town kids who became corporate magnates. From the reminiscences of George Bush and Julia Child to the astonishing heroism and moving love stories of everyday people, “The Greatest Generation” salutes those whose sacrifices changed the course of American history.

Non-Fiction | Random House, Inc