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

by Beverly Gage

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

Ride along with Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Beverly Gage as she travels the country to see the museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, reenactments, and souvenir shops where Americans learn—and fight—about our history. From the birth of the nation in Philadelphia to Disneyland and the California dream, This Land Is Your Land offers a guided tour of thirteen places and thirteen key moments that define America’s greatest successes and challenges.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a document that proclaimed the liberty and equality of all human beings, but produced a country that often failed to agree upon—or live up to—those ideals. This Land Is Your Land is for everyone who wants to find that history—to experience it and confront it, to celebrate it and condemn it—in the places where it happened.

Gage shows that Americans can face their past and still love their country. Toss the book in the back seat—or listen on audio with the windows down—and join the journey.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Travel, Historical, American History, Adventure, Education

Kindle Edition

Expected publication April 7, 2026

Reviews

[Jim Razinha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like history and I love road trips, and though my explorations do include visiting historic sites, ofttimes it’s more about the trip than the destination. For Ms. Gage, at least in this book, it’s the other way around and we are enriched. We get an academic's assessment of selected histories, but it doesn't read like an academic text. Far from it, this is an nice read.

She packs a lot into each of the 13 chapters though the reader doesn't have the burden of unpacking because this is well-composed. A bit of trip background, some historical background, overviews of what she saw (and didn't see) with enough depth to both satisfy curiosity and plant seeds for further digging. Some of the most interesting road trips are the ones that involve detours, side excursions and her narrative has those. We get some off the selected path seemingly meandering but every time she ties it back neatly to her overall theme for the chapter, or at least subsection of the chapter. I think James Burke would be proud of her Connections.

History may be written by the victors, but she went to places where the losers still have their own narrative, true or not. Ms Gage swings her critical eye on the exhibits, installations, museums she visits and shares with us the progress and regress of social change on how events are portrayed, ignored, and yes, distorted. She says, "While I hit many history-saturated places, I skipped some others, including a few we tend to think of as especially 'historic.' There is no Boston, no New York City, no New Orleans, no Washington, D.C." I've lived in some of the places she recounts here, and visited several others, though I admit I don't have a lot of interest in battlefields and war memorials. And she gave me a few eyeopeners in some of the places with which I was more familiar than the average resident/visitor.

I like her writing style. I don’t, however, like the Notes style she used. End notes with semi-anchoring sentence fragments from somewhere in the text are frustrating to me. They are an unwelcome scavenger hunt dependent on my patience to go back through the text. (Digital forms do make it easier with a search function, but physical copies? Yeah, frustrating. ) But .... she makes up for it with Recommended Reading lists that connect where she got some information with sources available to the reader.

I received a digital review copy of an advance uncorrected reader's proof of this from the publisher, Simon & Schuster through Edelweiss, for which I am grateful. My copy did not have any of the maps that will be in the final copy and I would be curious to see them.

Some of my highlights and observations:

“Then I became a historian. As part of my academic training, I took a more tempered and realistic look at the United States, with all of its contradictions and injustices. I also learned to be skeptical of self-congratulatory narratives: progress, manifest destiny, shining-city-on-a-hill exceptionalism. Historians tend to be myth-busters.”
{I like that kind of myth-busting and I appreciate when someone else does it, especially with history.}

"What I did not expect was how intensely local so much of that history would be. Each chapter of the book describes a small group of people who happened to live in a certain place at a certain time—and who, for that fleeting moment, came to stand in for the nation at large."

"Philadelphia is not just about the history that happened there; it’s about the ways Americans have invented and reinvented that history over time"
{How many of the places described - and not touched on at all - here are reinventions?}

[on the Ohio Presidential Trail]
"That […] might not sound so interesting, but between the 1840s and the 1920s Ohio produced a lot of presidents. (Since you asked: Harrison, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, another Harrison, McKinley, Taft, and Harding.)"
{now that I live in Ohio, perhaps I should check this out}

[on that particular thorn, Texas]
"Unlike Connecticut, Texas mandates that students actually learn about their state’s history.
Governor Greg Abbott thinks this history should be presented in 'heroic' form, without the 'political correctness' that has allegedly infected so many history books in recent years."
{Don’t get me started on Abbott and cronies, and that insufferable Texan attitude.}

[on tourist merch distorted by gun images or slogans adjunct to the "I was there" point of the tourist merch]
"I get it: Guns are a big deal in Texas. And to be fair, similar merchandise is sold at other historic sites too. But I’ve never understood why today’s aggressive gun politics should get to own all that history."
{Oh, my, but I do like how she phrased that.}

[on the 1846 Mexican War]
" Decades later, another general-turned-president, Ulysses S. Grant, looked back on the Mexican War as 'one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.' He believed that the crisis that followed—including the Civil War itself—was 'punishment' for seizing Texas and making it American."
{uh oh. Fast forward 180 years...}

[Chicago]
"Many of Chicago’s top destinations date back to the era of the Columbian Expo, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Newberry Library, the University of Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History, and Burnham’s Orchestra Hall. Chicago also contains the remnants of institutions built in an effort to answer the era’s social question. On the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, students and visitors can stop by Hull House, the influential “settlement house” established in 1889 by reformers Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, who believed that everyone—even the city’s poorest and newest residents—deserved access to the good life that modern industrial society had to offer."
{I really need to go back to Chicago and check out more than the Art Institute.}

[In Atlanta]
"While reading about all this [Stone Mountain, the community, state laws and how they've changed] in preparation for my return visit, I learned that I was going to be in Stone Mountain the day after Confederate Memorial Day—[…]"
{Wait, wtf? This is still a thing? Okay, dig a little and I see that it isn't a state recognized event in Geaorgia anymore, but it still is in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas. This is my surprised face.}

[on trying to talk to people at Stone Mountain about that ...observance]
"As several Sons [of the Confederacy] acknowledged, they had been instructed not to speak with the press—or even, apparently, with itinerant history teachers."

[on future National Parks development]
"The National Park Service has announced plans to invest $10 million in downtown Selma."
{Ms. Gage mentions the NPS planning to spend several many million$ in a couple of places. This book hasn't been published yet, so a caveat might be appropriate (“although the agency’s funding has been cut significantly in 2025 and these projects may have been cut.” She does acknowledge the program cuts to the NPS and other institutions in her Epilogue.}

[on a frustrating to me fact of unbalanced disparity]
"When Reagan was president in the 1980s, the population of Orange County was about two million people. Today it’s more than three million, making it the sixth most populous county in the United States, home to about the same number of people as Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas combined."
{And those states account for four times the senatorial representation that OC shares with 36 million other Californians.}

[on Disney's Carousel of Progress]
"The Carousel appeared as Progressland in the GE pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, one of the last American extravaganzas of its kind."
{I saw it! I was not quite four years old when my parent took me there (from tiny Montville Connecticut). I remember that, Borden's Elsie the Cow, Michaelangelo's The Pieta, and the Sinclair dinosaurs.}

[on the semiquincentennial]
"Some people may choose not to celebrate at all, given the state of things. But that’s a shame, since most of us do have to live in this country and might as well figure out which parts of it are worth cheering for. I hope this book has offered some ways to think about the nation and its history with room for criticism and optimism, patriotism and dissent, the highs and the lows."
{Hear, hear! We are witnessing erasure and rewriting unfold, but they should get to own all that history.}

[Jackie Sunday · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have time to read just one book this year, this is an excellent choice.

Beverly Gage is a professor of history at Yale University. She could easily write a massive book with her knowledge. Yet, she decided to take a different approach with a road trip visiting historic sites including museums, battlefields, parks, monuments and roadside attractions. They’re not necessarily your normal tourist places which makes it more interesting.

The book starts with President Washington in 1789. She shares some of the immense amount of history with the 13 colonies. She covers distressing parts with the slaughter of thousands of Native Americans to obtain their land, the war on Mexico in 1846 and the sad treatment of slaves. In later chapters, she includes Martin Luther King and his powerful speeches.

She covers Henry Ford’s progressive car manufacturer and how he brought immigrants to work in the Detroit area factories. It became well known that Ford was antisemitic supporting Hitler. Sadly, five protesters were killed.

The author addresses how the federal government developed military programs to create special weapons at different places in the country. She touches on Oppenheimer’s work with the team on the atomic bomb. Rather than stay at a nice hotel or camping ground, she decided to experience a night in a restored missile silo in New Mexico.

The federal government hasn’t been kind to immigrants. During the war, American citizens who happened to be Japanese were sent to “prison camps’ in the early 1940s. We can’t read about this without thinking we are all immigrants and how many groups have been unfairly treated.

And finally, she reviews the politics of California with the conservative southern side of Presidents Nixon and Reagan while northern liberal groups were promoting equal rights for women and gays as well as free speech. At the same time, Black Panthers were fighting about police brutality and poverty.

Our past history as noted has many parts that are disturbing. There’s a great deal about racial injustice. When will we learn? Throughout the book she adds photos and at the end, there is an extensive list of recommended books. It’s no wonder she is a scholar. Yet, she writes as if you were listening to a friendly person at a coffee shop who shares what she knows.

She said that the powerful people in Washington want to suppress history but do they understand it? There are many ways of looking at the cruelty over the years: truth or the blind eye? I could feel it when she said “hope” at the end for a better future. Isn’t that what most of us want?

My thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book with an expected release date of April 7, 2026. My views I share are my own.

[Kelly Burke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a delight to read, it is not a heavy history book, but it is deeply informative. The title represents the book well. I really enjoyed how this book was organized! It focused on a particular area and period of time per chapter, but it so smoothly works its way chronologically through history from one chapter to the next, going from one part of the country to another seamlessly. She covers so many notable events and ones that you may not have studied or remembered. It was an easy narrative to read but still packed full of information. This is also a timely book, coming up to America's 250th anniversary, so it is a good reminder of where we have come, what has happened throughout our history, to better think about where we want to go. This book avoids politics (appropriately so, it's just about reporting what happened, you can form your own opinions), the end emphasizes the need for each of us to remember that "this is our land", this is the only land we have, we have to live together here, so how do we want to move forward? Overall it was a positive book, leaving you feel more knowledgeable and empowered and proud.
Thank you NetGalley for this ARC; these opinions are my own.

[Sarah Pitcher-hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always been a history buff, and I especially love to read anything to do with American history. What I loved about this book was how Beverly Gage did not just go to all the old "tried and true" places from American history; she traveled off the beaten path to show us museums and historical sites that maybe one would not know about. Yet, in doing this, she also touched on many important events in American history. It was a road trip that I loved taking within the covers of a book! From the chapter where I learned about the Trail of Tears National Park to the one where I learned about the Phil Collins collection of Alamo memorabilia, this book was a fun road trip! I hope to use it for some of my next adventures, and I recommend many places to my daughter, who is doing a cross-country drive in a couple of weeks. And always remember, as Gage said, in the epilogue: "Plan ahead, but not too much....it's the wrong turns and unexpected places where you learn the most." The journey is what matters! Thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

[Marianne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book and did learn about many interesting monuments and historical tidbits along the way. However, what really soured the book for me was the author’s overt criticism and bias. The author, Beverly Gage, is a professor of history at Yale. She prioritizes opinion over facts. For example, she writes that the American flag is “deployed as a form of aggression.” Huh? Displaying love of country, in your country is aggressive? And, in the penultimate sentence of the book, she refers to the United States as “this big, cruel, and transcendent country of ours.” Interesting choice of adjectives. Almost every site she visited can be used as an option for a redress of grievances. Not a point of history as much as a reminder for national ignominy. Yes, history is fraught with horrific injustices. But, it is also replete with stories of glory and hope and it doesn’t make sense to market this book as a travel guide when it reads more as propaganda. I wouldn’t have read it if it were honest about its message.

This book is antithetical to the spirit, grit, and gratitude that built the United States. It is a heavy handed critique that attempts to negate what is wondrous about the country, and for all its faults, many still yearn to be a part of the American experiment. Yet, the rhetoric featured in this book tells us that we should feel incensed and ashamed of the very institutions that propelled the U. S. into becoming the paradigm of a free people. I don’t know how successful this book will become, but I feel that the political dogma contained in it will alienate a large swath of Americans. This Land Is Your Land, as a title, is a misnomer.

[Megan Hamby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book truly feels like a road trip through America’s story, and I loved that Gage doesn’t just hit the big, well-known sites. She also doesn’t shy away from hard topics—slavery, America’s treatment of Indigenous peoples, and the complex questions around monuments and “celebrating” people with very complicated legacies. I appreciated how thoughtfully and honestly those conversations were handled.

I read this one slowly because I was learning so much and actually wanted it to sink in. By the end, though, I kind of felt like I could absolutely crush an American history category on Jeopardy. 😅

Honestly, Gage made me want to plan a historical road trip for fall break (apologies in advance to my 8-year-old, who will be deeply unimpressed). As we head toward America’s 250th birthday, this felt like a timely reminder that we can look honestly at our nation’s past—the highs and the lows—and still care deeply about where our country is headed.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Land Is Your Land by Beverly Gage isa book we need right now. In this brief tome, Gage takes the reader through a few of America's historical highlights, some that don't often make the tour. With a the lens of the historian that Gage is, she enlightens the reader with engaging prose and deftly reminds the reader how important it is to know your history. Hence why in this time when Dear Leader Tr*mp and his cabal of ignorant racists are doing their best to eradicate history, knowing our history is more important than ever. I appreciated the hopeful tone of Gage's book. Thank you to #netgalley and #simonandshuster for the opportunity to preview this book.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author takes the approach of touring certain National Parks/Monuments in chronological order beginning with the founding of our country. She is very forthright in discussing both the good, the conflicted and the bad that took place at each location. She is a firm believer in that we should not eliminate controversial items from public display as they reinforce how far we have come as a nation. Overall, a good read and I recommend it to history buffs.

I received a free arc of this book courtesy to Net Galley and the Publisher in exchange for a review. I also posted it to Goodreads and Amazon.

[Kimijo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pulitzer winning historian Beverly Gage takes readers on a road trip to thirteen key American sites, exploring pivotal moments in the nation’s history. This Land is Your Land examines how Americans remember, celebrate, and confront their past, offering insights into the country’s successes, failures, and ongoing struggles with liberty, equality, and identity.

[Anshuman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beverly Gage takes us on a journey through the forgotten and lesser-known parts of American history. Engaging, humorous, and rigorously researched, this book is a modern classic and almost unputdownable. Highly recommended.

I received an ARC of this book from Simon & Schuster (via NetGalley) in exchange for an honest review.

[Nick Perkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

sorry about getting Covid during the last chapter mom!