By Tim Grove
One doesn’t need to be particularly astute to predict that tourism officials will be looking to promote history sites and museums more than usual in 2026. While it is normal for history practitioners and tourism folks to work together at times, as more attention is given to America’s 250th anniversary period, history professionals should seize any opportunity for increased marketing and renewed relationships with tourism. Given expected marketing campaigns, it remains to be seen whether Americans as a whole will focus inward in 2026 and take more domestic trips.
One massive travel site debuted this year, presented by the U.S. Department of Transportation: The Great American Road Trip. I decided to take a critical look to see how much history is included and what kind of history. The site calls itself “the official travel site of the USA.” Another tag line on the site is “You’ve got to see America to celebrate America.” It is not clear who the audience is, though, given its driving tour distances seem to be measured solely in kilometers and plenty of information is available on the site about U.S. visa and entry policies.
The massive site divides the country by six regions. When I selected Northeast, the first items to appear were ten New York sites, starting with Ellis Island with a link to New York City sites. The next site was National Baseball Hall of Fame with a link to Cooperstown and the surrounding region. These entry point are not intuitive, but with some exploring I found other entry points.
I did a search for one of the iconic sites: Mount Vernon. Three links appeared: a page specific to Mount Vernon, a page listing five attractions near Dulles Airport, and a page for the state of Virginia. A search for Monticello brought up nothing but the Monticello wine region with a mention and photo of Jefferson’s home. It did appear in the list of Unesco World Heritage Sites along with a link to the Unesco page.
Then I decided to search by theme: World War I. The result was over a hundred links to random diverse tourist attractions but not connected to the theme. Sadly a specific search for the National World War I Museum failed to produce a page about that excellent Kansas City museum. It did pull up a page for Kansas City, which mentioned the museum and a description of it under the Tripadvisor section. A similar search for the well-known National World War II museum in New Orleans also failed to pull up a specific page on the museum. By doing a search for New Orleans, I got the destination New Orleans page and a Tripadvisor link.
Since the site gives emphasis to road trips, I was happy to see extensive space devoted to various Civil Rights trails, with ten sites you would expect to see. The Civil Rights History Trail is a suggested 1-2 week road trip through Southern sites, and the Pony Express trail page links to the NPS page about the trail. However, a search for Lewis and Clark, one of America’s more well-known history trails, did not produce any links. Route 66 is included, of course, as is the Great River Road along the Mississippi from Minnesota to Louisiana.
Ultimately this is a site for exploring America, overwhelming in scope and not necessarily super intuitive for navigation. But I found the more time I spent on the site, the more I learned its navigational challenges. Search for your favorite history sites and museums and see if they are included. If not, a contact form allows you to correspond with the site creators. Maybe they will add to it. I’m guessing it is built to last several years. Its corporate partners Tripadvisor and Expedia probably required that.
Tim Grove can be reached at [email protected].
