12. Charlottesville 

As cyclists ride through downtown Charlottesville, two monuments on the edge of the University of Virginia campus provide two starkly different representations of Virginia’s history: a statue to Thomas Jefferson and a memorial to the enslaved people who built the university. The contrast between the two monuments in design and meaning is profound, respectively recognizing individual leadership and the collective subaltern agency of an oppressed community. This episode uses these two monuments along Route 76 in downtown Charlottesville to explore the longer history of how Americans recognize and remember history and how these patterns of recognition and remembrance are shaped by contemporary contexts. The episode is connected to the city of Charlottesville, located just under 200 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and just about 350 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia.