This Land Is Your Land

Pulitzer Prize–winning author of G-Man and notable historian Beverly Gage goes on the ultimate road trip to explore thirteen key places in American history that explain our past and help us envision our future. Two and a half centuries out from the US founding, the question of what it means to be an American is as fraught as ever. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Beverly Gage brings the highs and lows of our past alive on a road trip through the American past. This Land is Your Land visits thirteen places and thirteen key moments in American history to explore how we commemorate our national past and consider the future of our union. In this book, Gage hits the road to explore the museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, monuments, living-history pageants, battlefield reenactments, and souvenir shops where Americans so often go to learn—and fight—about our past. This Land is Your Land is for everyone who wants to find US history—to experience it and confront it, to celebrate it and condemn it—in the places where it happened. From the birth of the nation in Philadelphia and on the Virginia plantations to the rise of the Cold War Southwest and the advent of Disneyland, here is the story of America’s successes and failures, along with the endless controversies over how we remember ourselves. 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 yielded a country often riddled with conflict and injustice. This Land is Your Land is an invitation to explore and reflect on our deep national tensions—to understand where we are as a country by traveling through our inspiring, disturbing, and maddening past rather than turning away from it.