Yorktown, Va., was hot and humid last week, but my wife didn't mind. She's always in her element when it comes to wading through the thicket of America's revolutionary past.

August in Virginia is heaven to someone who wants to understand every nuance of the British defeat and the American victory in October 1781 that ended our War of Independence.

At her insistence, we visited every major historic site in nearby Williamsburg, the center of Virginia's colonial government until 1780 and the staging ground for George Washington and Comte de Rochambeau's final victory over the British.

Under a hot midday sun on Yorktown's historic battlefield, my wife pressed the U.S. Park Service docent harder than Lord Cornwallis himself probably would have under the circumstances.

She wanted to understand the military missteps and bad luck that contributed to the British loss. Did Washington and his French allies display tactical brilliance or were the rebels recipients of a run of uncommonly good fortune -- like the Pittsburgh Pirates on a five-game winning streak?

Circling every redoubt as if expecting to catch a glimpse of Alexander Hamilton's ghost in the corner of her eye, she scanned the historic mounds and the flags on the horizon indicating military position for clues.

"The British had the mightiest military in the world at the time," she said at one point, "but they still lost. All the Americans had to do was hold on." There was considerably more to the American victory than that, but she was simplifying things for my sake.

I made what I thought was a good point about empires assuming they could successfully project military power over long distances just because they had superior technology, but she didn't take the bait. Her perennial suspicion about me is that I see historical analogies where there are none.

Having learned from previous battles that she doesn't respect glibness, I didn't mention Vietnam or my growing concerns about the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan potentially echoing 18th-century British colonialism. My fear is that whatever luck may have fallen our way at Yorktown evaporated a long time ago.

Until you stumble across an interactive version mounted near the entrance of the Yorktown Victory Center, a museum that chronicles the nation's birth, it's easy to forget how radical a document the Declaration of Independence really is.

In the low lights of the museum, these words glowed like a primordial fire at the press of a button: "WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

If you're not haunted by those words as you stumble through the rest of the museum's exhibits, then it's possible you've misplaced your soul. It's impossible not to feel the weight of our national contradictions and how our actions have consistently undermined our highest ideals from the toleration of slavery to the loss of rational civic engagement. Thomas Paine has been replaced by radio bloviators and agitators of the gullible.

Emerging from the artificially low lights of the museum to the blinding midday sun, I was encouraged by the sight of a Muslim family -- the women in traditional garb, the men and children in jeans and sneakers -- posing for pictures in front of that temple of American patriotism. Whatever our nation's many contradictions, they were happy to claim it as part of their history, too.

On the drive down from Pittsburgh, I joked with my wife about the lunacy of vacationing in the "cradle of the Confederacy" during the 150th anniversary of what many Southerners still call "the war of Northern Aggression." It was a theme that wore on her nerves as the week progressed without a single Confederate battle flag sighting on a bumper or T-shirt anywhere.

"Rednecks aren't interested in coming to places like Yorktown or Williamsburg," she said, pointing to a trio of American flag poles in the distance. "Don't you get it? This is where America was born."

The black folks wandering the streets of colonial Williamsburg in full costume made me uncomfortable because I didn't know how to relate to them. Some were free and some were slaves, but they all stayed in character. When I asked one "slave" where I could get a drink of water, he was obsequious and deferential to a fault.

I felt like grabbing him by the shoulders and screaming: "Just hold on, brother, your day is coming."