This Land Is Your Land: A Guest Post by Beverly Gage

Hop in and let an award-winning historian take you on an American adventure where the past meets the present. Journey through thirteen landmark locations that together reveal the full sweep of U.S. history. Read on for an exclusive essay from Beverly Gage on writing This Land Is Your Land. 

Pulitzer Prize–winning author of G-Man and acclaimed historian Beverly Gage takes the ultimate road trip into the American past.

A few years ago, I started looking ahead to 2026, the nation’s semiquincentennial, better known as the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence. I was worried.

Official activities seemed to be shaping up slowly, if at all. I was also concerned about what sort of message might be conveyed. In recent decades, our historical discourse has tended to divide into all “yay” (only tell the good parts of the story) or all “nay” (the bad ones are what defines us). I wanted to find a way to mark the 250th that could put the whole range of stories together: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I had also just finished writing a doorstop-sized biography of the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, which had required an awful lot of time sitting alone at my desk. So I wanted to get out of the office too. I decided to combine these two impulses into This Land Is Your Land, my new book retelling 250 years of American history as a series of road trips throughout the country.

I always loved going on history-minded road trips with my son, who tolerated it when he was little but eventually came to appreciate and even embrace it. I thought maybe I could offer a guide for other families who want to mark the semiquin by learning about American history, but who might be ambivalent about too much rah-rah celebration this year. The premise of the book is that Americans can face their history and still love their country. Patriotism and dissent are not separate categories.

The book starts Revolution-era Philadelphia area, where I grew up and (arguably) where the United States began. It ends in mid-20th-century California, home to Disneyland, the single most influential historic attraction in the United States (and, not incidentally, part of the setting for my next big book: a biography of Ronald Reagan).

In between, I visited places large and small, famous and obscure, in every region of the continental U.S. To learn about abolitionism and women’s rights, I headed for upstate New York, where legendary figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton once lived as friends, rivals, and neighbors. To explore America’s industrial past, I went to Chicago, Illinois; Terre Haute, Indiana; and Dearborn, Michigan. In the Southwest, I ventured into modern military history, visiting Los Alamos and spending the night in a nuclear missile outside Roswell, New Mexico. That last one I found a bit daunting but it turned out to be great: a full-service underground Airbnb, with running water, wifi, and period-appropriate décor, alongside the empty silo that once housed an Atlas missile.

My hope is that anyone curious about American history can learn something new from my travels. Even better, I hope readers will be inspired to hit the road and explore for themselves.