What does a freezing December night in 1776 have in common with an 1851 art blockbuster and a 1953 painting? They all share the same five words: Washington Crossing the Delaware. Using a simple disambiguation list as a map, this episode traces how a desperate military gamble the day after Christmas, made to save a collapsing Continental Army, became one of the most reworked images in American cultural memory.

We follow the phrase from Thomas Sully’s 1819 The Passage of the Delaware to Emanuel Leutze’s three 1851 versions, a centennial statue in Trenton in 1876, David Shulman’s 1936 sonnet, and Larry Rivers’s 1953 painting. Along the way we look at the famous inaccuracies in Leutze’s image and ask whether we remember the real event or the art made long after it.

• Why the real crossing on December 26, 1776 was a near-desperate gamble
• How Sully’s title The Passage gave the crossing an almost biblical weight
• Leutze’s anachronistic flag, sunrise lighting, wrong boats and standing Washington
• Why a statue in a public square works differently than a painting in a gallery
• How Larry Rivers responded to Leutze’s cliché rather than to the 1776 event