Гетисбърг, Пенсилвания

Gettysburg is ten thousand small towns' worth of history in one. For three days in July 1863 the largest battle ever fought in North America surged through its streets and wheatfields — over 50,000 casualties — and turned the tide of the Civil War; four months later Abraham Lincoln came to dedicate the soldiers' cemetery and delivered, in 272 words, the Gettysburg Address, the most concentrated statement of the American idea ever made. The battlefield, preserved as a national military park of monuments and quiet ridgelines, surrounds the town completely; to walk Pickett's Charge at dusk is an experience no museum can reproduce. A century later the town acquired a second president: Dwight Eisenhower bought the only home he ever owned beside the battlefield, and his farm is preserved as he left it.

Town life centres on Gettysburg College, founded in 1832, whose Pennsylvania Hall served as a hospital for both armies during the battle. The college also restored the archive's stage: the Majestic Theater of 1925, the grand vaudeville and picture palace where the Eisenhowers watched films, reopened in 2005 as the region's performing-arts centre, its gilded auditorium now hosting orchestras, opera and touring artists. In Gettysburg even the concert hall has witnesses.