‘Do you know who he is?’ I asked the middle-aged man standing in front of the statue of John Paul Jones, one ofWashington DC’s many monuments and memorials built to convey American national self-confidence. Not far from us on the National Mall stood the towering Washington Memorial, completed in 1884 in recognition of the first president of the United States, and the iconic Lincoln Memorial, the huge classical building memorialising the Great Emancipator dedicated in 1922 and famous as the location of Dr Martin Luther King’s 1963 ‘I have a dream’ speech.
The presence of the John Paul Jones statue beside these other major sites of historical remembrance surely needs no explanation. ‘Father of the US Navy’ and swashbuckling hero of the American Revolution, Jones was feared by the British, especially after the battle of Flamborough Head and his daring seizure of HMS Serapis in 1779.Today his body lies beneath a huge marble crypt at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he inspires the next generation of US naval officers, all of whom are taught about
