This Land Is Your Land

Beverly Gage, a Yale historian who previously wrote a biography of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, sets out to explore the United States through its historic sites as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary. Traveling during 2023 and early 2024, she visits museums, battlefields, monuments, and roadside attractions across the country. The book, organized into thirteen chronological chapters, blends memoir, travelogue, and historical survey, framed by Gage's conviction that Americans can be "patriots and critics, citizens and dissenters, all at once" (xviii).

Gage begins in suburban Philadelphia, where she grew up during the 1976 bicentennial. At Valley Forge, a living-history guide recounts the winter of 1777–78, when 12,000 soldiers, including hundreds of Black and non-English-speaking men, were forged into a professional army. In Philadelphia, the Museum of the American Revolution tells the Revolution from three perspectives: the white revolutionaries, enslaved Black people, and the Oneida Nation, an Indigenous community that fought alongside the rebels but later lost nearly all its guaranteed land.

In Virginia, Gage examines how slavery and freedom grew up together, tracing evolving interpretations at presidential estates. She profiles Ona Maria Judge, enslaved at Mount Vernon, who fled to New Hampshire in 1796. At Monticello, historian Annette Gordon-Reed's research forced the site to acknowledge Thomas Jefferson's sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenager who bore at least six of his children. Some Virginians chose manumission, the legal freeing of enslaved people, during the revolutionary era, but a failed 1800 rebellion led by an enslaved man named Gabriel near Richmond ended these impulses.

In Tennessee, Gage pursues Andrew Jackson's legacy and the forced expulsion of the Cherokee. Jackson embodied a new democratic politics for white men but championed what scholars now call ethnic cleansing. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 passed the House by just five votes, with Davy Crockett as the lone Tennessee congressman to vote against it, calling the policy "oppression with a vengeance" (53). At the Cherokee Removal Memorial Park, names carved into dark rock convey the scale of the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation to Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma.

Texas comes next, where Gage and her son Nick explore the state's founding myths. The Texian revolt against Mexico, led by Anglo-American settlers in Mexican Texas, was fundamentally about slavery: Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, and settlers rebelled to protect the institution. The resulting Texas constitution banned free Black people, prohibited restrictions on slavery, and made no mention of equality. Gage traces how annexation in 1845 led to the Mexican-American War, which resulted in the U.S. acquiring vast Western territories.

Upstate New York's Erie Canal corridor, sometimes called the Burned-Over District for its religious revivals and reform, provides the setting for the intertwined causes of the 1840s and 1850s. Abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass settled in Rochester to publish The North Star. At Seneca Falls, Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the 1848 women's rights convention that declared "all men and women are created equal" (91). Gage emphasizes the friendships connecting Douglass, women's rights leader Susan B. Anthony, abolitionist Harriet Tubman, New York senator William Seward, and patron Gerrit Smith. Abolitionist John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, funded by Smith, tore the community apart but hastened the reckoning over slavery.

South Carolina anchors the Civil War chapter. The 1860 Democratic convention collapsed in Charleston, handing the election to Abraham Lincoln. The Reconstruction Era National Historical Park in Beaufort centers on Robert Smalls, born into slavery, who commandeered a Confederate ship in 1862 and later helped draft the state's 1868 constitution, only to see former Confederates reclaim power by the late 1870s. Gage also covers Charleston's reckoning with its past, from the 2015 mass shooting at Mother Emanuel Church to the 2020 removal of a statue of John C. Calhoun, a former U.S. senator and vice president who championed slavery as a "positive good."

The Mountain West chapters trace how U.S. Army cavalry officer George Armstrong Custer's 1876 defeat at Little Bighorn became legend through Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West shows and the campaign of Custer's widow, Elizabeth "Libbie" Custer. At a reenactment on Crow Nation land, Gage watches Native warriors run circles around the U.S. Cavalry. She documents the destruction of Indigenous life: bison reduced from over 30 million to 700, forced reservations, and the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.

Chicago's Gilded Age illustrates the conflicts between industrial wealth and working-class misery. Gage visits the Haymarket Memorial, commemorating the 1886 bombing and the execution of four anarchists, and tours the Pullman company town. At the Debs House in Terre Haute, Indiana, she learns about Eugene Debs, who led the 1894 Pullman strike, read Marx in prison, and ran for president five times as a socialist.

Atlanta reveals the contradictions of the "New South." At Stone Mountain, the world's largest Confederate memorial, Gage attends a rally organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. She visits the group's National Confederate Museum in Columbia, Tennessee, which frames slavery as offering a higher standard of living than industrial labor. In the Sweet Auburn neighborhood, she explores the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park, including King's childhood home and the church where he preached.

Henry Ford's legacy fills the Detroit chapter. Gage tours the River Rouge, once the world's largest factory, and visits the overpass where Ford security beat union organizers in 1937. At Greenfield Village, Ford's living-history creation, she encounters his contradictory vision: a billionaire who loved rural nostalgia but championed industrial progress, and who became America's leading anti-Semite while remaining one of its most admired men.

The Southwest chapters examine World War II's transformation of the American landscape. At Los Alamos, Gage tours the site where physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer led the team that built the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. At Manzanar in California, she walks the grounds where more than 10,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II under Executive Order 9066. She spends a night in a decommissioned nuclear missile silo near Roswell, New Mexico.

The Civil Rights Trail takes Gage through Alabama and Mississippi. In Montgomery, she visits the Rosa Parks Museum and the Legacy Museum, founded by civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, which traces a line from enslavement to mass incarceration. Along Highway 80 to Selma, the 1965 voting rights march route, she crosses the Edmund Pettus Bridge, still named for a Confederate officer despite calls to rename it for congressman John Lewis. In Mississippi, she discovers Mound Bayou, an all-Black town founded by formerly enslaved people in 1887, and visits Graball Landing, where a bulletproof marker stands at the site where Emmett Till's body was pulled from the river in 1955.

The final chapter examines Disneyland and mid-century California conservatism. At the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan presidential libraries, Gage traces how Southern California produced a conservative movement built on anti-communism, tax cuts, and racial resentment. At Knott's Berry Farm, she finds a replica of Independence Hall surrounded by thrill rides and a teenage staffer who has never heard of it.

In the epilogue, Gage expresses concern about a 2025 executive order directing the National Park Service to solicit complaints about anything "negative about either past or living Americans" (265) but reports coming away more heartened than expected, finding "a quiet hope that next time we'll do it better" (264). She closes by echoing folk songwriter Woody Guthrie, whose 1940s song "This Land Is Your Land" gives the book its title: "Whether we like it or not, this big, cruel, and transcendent country of ours, we're in it together. Let's make of it what we can" (270).