This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History

This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History (2026) is a work of nonfiction by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage. Combining narrative history and travelogue, the book chronicles Gage’s journey across the United States in the years leading up to the nation’s 250th anniversary. Troubled by a polarized political climate that simplifies the past, she embarked on a series of road trips to explore how American history is remembered and contested at its museums, monuments, and historic sites. Gage is also the author of the award-winning biography G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (2022).

Each of the book’s 13 chapters focuses on a specific time and place. Gage examines how historic sites emphasize Public Memory as a Cultural Battleground, where competing narratives about national identity and historical justice are constantly debated. She also interrogates The Tensions of Industrialization and Progress, showing how moments of celebrated national advancement were often predicated on exploitation and violence. While discussing her travels, Gage traces The Parallel Roots of Freedom and Oppression, arguing that from the nation’s founding, its ideals of liberty have been shaped by systems of slavery and dispossession.

This guide refers to the 2026 Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness, death, child death, graphic violence, physical abuse, emotional abuse, racism, and religious discrimination.

Summary

Historian Beverly Gage, raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has grown concerned about the polarized state of the United States’ historical consciousness. Troubled by a political discourse that favors veneration or damnation over nuanced understanding, and with the nation’s 250th anniversary looming, she embarked on a series of road trips to explore the country’s past as it exists in its museums, monuments, and historic sites. Gage sought to understand how Americans today learn about and contend with their shared, often contradictory, history. Her journey was an attempt to reconcile the nation’s highest ideals with its harshest realities, starting in its revolutionary birthplace, Philadelphia. There, she visited Independence Hall, the Brandywine battlefield, and Valley Forge, and she reflects on the messy, uncertain reality of the American Revolution, a war of attrition far from the heroic myths of her childhood. While discussing the Museum of the American Revolution, she notes how historical memory is actively constructed, with George Washington’s field tent presented as a symbol of democratic leadership.

Gage traveled south to Virginia to confront the central paradox of the nation’s founding: the codification of freedom and slavery side by side. She describes her visits to the presidential plantations of Washington’s Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and James Madison’s Montpelier and focuses on the lives of enslaved people. The stories of Ona Judge, who was enslaved by Washington at Mount Vernon and self-emancipated in Philadelphia; Sally Hemings, who bore at least six of Jefferson’s children; and Paul Jennings, who was enslaved by the Madisons, reveal the deep contradictions of a republic built by men who championed liberty while holding others in bondage. 

Gage’s journey then took her to Tennessee to explore the legacy of Andrew Jackson. At his home, The Hermitage, she found the heroic narrative of a “common man’s” president, but she contrasts this with the brutal history of his Indian Removal policy. She followed the Trail of Tears from the Cherokee perspective, visiting the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum and the former Cherokee capitals of New Echota and Red Clay, and discusses their sophisticated political resistance before their forced expulsion. In Texas, accompanied by her son, Nick, she visited sites like the Alamo. She deconstructs the state’s origin myth, noting that the fight for independence was driven as much by the desire to preserve slavery as by a love of liberty.

The road trip turned north to the “Burned-Over District” of upstate New York (80), a hotbed of antebellum reform movements. There, Gage found a different American tradition, one where activists repurposed the nation’s founding ideals to demand radical change. She describes the intertwined lives of Frederick Douglass in Rochester, the women’s rights pioneers led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton at Seneca Falls, and the wealthy abolitionist financier Gerrit Smith. This network of reformers, which also included Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony, laid the groundwork for a second American revolution, which found its most extreme expression in their complicated ally John Brown, whose raid on Harpers Ferry was planned with support from his New York comrades. 

Gage then traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, to investigate the origins of the Civil War. She examines the pro-slavery ideology of John C. Calhoun and describes her visit Fort Sumter, where the first shots were fired. She contrasts this history of secession with the hopeful “rehearsal for Reconstruction” in nearby Beaufort (112), where formerly enslaved people like Robert Smalls forged a new, free society during the war.

Gage’s travels took her west to the Dakotas and Montana to unpack the myth of the American West. While discussing the Little Bighorn battlefield, she traces the evolution of the “Custer’s Last Stand” narrative from a story of heroic sacrifice to a more complex tale of Indigenous nations’ victory and resistance. Gage visited the “Wild West” town of Deadwood, South Dakota, and the monumental sculptures of Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse. She explores how the West was cemented in the national imagination as the true heart of America, a process shaped by figures like Theodore Roosevelt. 

The journey then moved to the industrial heartland. In Gilded Age Chicago, Illinois, Gage explored the vast chasm between the wealthy elite and the immigrant working class, visiting George Pullman’s model town and the Haymarket Memorial. This chapter of her journey highlights the rise of explosive class conflict and the labor movement, personified by socialist leader Eugene Debs. In Atlanta, Georgia, she investigated the ideology of the “New South,” a vision of industrial progress built on racial segregation. She toured the World of Coca-Cola but also confronted the violent legacy of the “Lost Cause” at the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial, contrasting it with the resilient Black community of Sweet Auburn, where Martin Luther King Jr. was raised.

In Dearborn, Michigan, Gage explored the vast empire of Henry Ford, a man of deep contradictions. She toured the monumental River Rouge factory, a symbol of American industrial might, and the nostalgic Greenfield Village, which reflects Ford’s yearning for a simpler, rural past. She discusses the history of fierce labor conflict, including how the United Auto Workers battled Ford’s anti-union forces. 

Her journey through the 20th century continued in the Southwest, a landscape transformed by World War II and the Cold War. She visited the secret city of Los Alamos, New Mexico, where J. Robert Oppenheimer developed the atomic bomb, and the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California, a stark monument to the injustice of Japanese American incarceration. Gage’s exploration of this hidden history culminated in her spending a night in a decommissioned nuclear missile silo near Roswell, New Mexico. Her final historical stop was the Deep South, where she traveled the Civil Rights Trail. In Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, she visited sites central to the struggles of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. In the Mississippi Delta, she confronted the brutal murder of Emmett Till and discovered the nearly forgotten history of Mound Bayou, a pioneering all-Black town.

The journey concluded in Southern California, the epicenter of the postwar “American dream.” Reflecting on her trip to Disneyland, Gage analyzes how Walt Disney crafted a sanitized and commercialized version of the American past that deeply influenced the nation’s self-image. She connects this cultural vision to the rise of the New Right in Orange County. She visited the presidential libraries of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who channeled this optimistic, mythic conservatism into a dominant political force. Finding a brick-by-brick replica of Independence Hall at the Knott’s Berry Farm theme park brought her journey full circle, showing the constant reinvention of America’s founding symbols.

In the Epilogue, Gage discusses her return home to New Haven, Connecticut, and reflects on her travels. She concludes that, despite political polarization, Americans remain deeply engaged with their past in local, tangible ways. She finds hope not in a simple story of progress but in an ongoing, often contentious, dialogue with history. The contradictions she witnessed—of liberty and oppression, failure and resilience—are not signs of a nation in terminal decline but are central to the American story itself. Embracing Lyndon B. Johnson’s idea of the US as a nation “always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again” (268), she argues for a “usable past” that is honest about its flaws but still provides the tools and inspiration for citizens to shape a better future.