This Land is Your Land by Beverly Gage

This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage — a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian’s journey across America to the places where the nation’s past is remembered, contested, and kept alive.

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Yale historian Beverly Gage hits the road. Traveling to museums, battlefields, monuments, roadside attractions, and living-history sites across the country, she explores how Americans learn — and fight — about their history.

From Independence Hall and Valley Forge to the Alamo, Selma, Mount Rushmore, and Disneyland, Gage visits thirteen key places that capture the country’s greatest successes and deepest contradictions. Along the way she encounters the stories we tell about freedom and slavery, progress and exclusion, patriotism and dissent. The result is both a vivid travelogue and a clear-eyed meditation on what it means to love a complicated country.

Engaging, insightful, and deeply American, This Land is Your Land invites readers to experience history where it happened — and to consider how the past continues to shape the present. Perfect for the nation’s semiquincentennial and for anyone who believes we can be patriots and critics at the same time.