Beverly Gage grew up just outside of Philadelphia in the suburbs of Delaware County, known as Delco. Throughout her 1970s childhood, she visited Independence Hall, the Philadelphia landmark where the country's founding fathers debated and signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
In her new book, "This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History" (Simon & Schuster), the Yale historian calls trips to such hallowed historic sites an American ritual, one "in which we visit the places where history happened to figure out who we are in the present." The book debuted last week at #12 on The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list.
As part of her road trip, Gage visited 300 historic sites around the country in 2023 and '24, including museums, parks, battlefields, and monuments, as a way to "explore, if not reconcile, the greatest tensions of American history." Gage takes her readers along for a ride through 19 states, arranging the trips chronologically to follow the course of American history, from 1776 to the present.
Inspired by the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, the book is "about the conversation that has been happening over 250 years about what it means to be American, what the founding legacy is about, who gets to claim it, who gets to reinterpret it, and who gets to try to throw it away and invent something else," Gage said in an interview.
Gage is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History, in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her book "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century" (Penguin Random House, 2023) won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, as well as the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography.
Last year she joined with two other Yale historians to teach the Devane Lecture course on "America at 250: A History." (Those lectures may be viewed online at no charge.)
Gage sat down with Yale News to talk about mythmaking and national image, her fascination with rich businessmen who try to put their stamp on American history, and an overnight in a former nuclear missile silo.
