The Expert as Tourist | Los Angeles Review of Books

This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage. Simon & Schuster, 2026. 352 pages.

YALE HISTORIAN Beverly Gage begins her road trip through the United States with a visit to Independence Hall in her hometown of Philadelphia, the site of many childhood visits. In her new book This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History, she describes George Washington’s chair from the Constitutional Convention, with its “half-round sun, its rays peeking out over the horizon, carved into the wood and painted in gold.” Benjamin Franklin pondered at the time “whether that sun was rising or falling on the nation that had been created.” Gage notes that “we are once again at a moment when many Americans are wondering if the sun is rising or setting over our republic.” “Like many Americans,” she tells us, “I grew up on the progress story”: the idea that the future would be better than the past, that the US was slowly becoming more egalitarian. For a variety of reasons, she writes, many Americans are now questioning the truth of that narrative. Her road trip—or, rather, series of trips—across the country is a means of reckoning with the state of the nation on its semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Like her childhood trips to historical sites, Gage suggests that this is “part of an American ritual, in which we visit the places where history happened to figure out who we are in the present.”

Like an old station wagon, the road trip genre is reliable and familiar: a means of finding cultural identity and memory through a physical journey. Even though Gage reminds us that the American road trip predates the automobile, the specifically American take on this genre, I would argue, involves the car. My personal favorite—and Gage’s too, it seems—is Travels with Charley (1962), John Steinbeck’s chronicle of his 1960 trip with his poodle “in search of America”—which Gage would have liked to replicate, except that her dog Scooby “detests” cars. (The subtitle of the UK edition of Gage’s book seemingly also gestures to Steinbeck’s title: “On a Road Trip to Make Sense of America.”) Road trip narratives are, of course, fictionalized to some extent: readers have picked apart exactly how many miles Steinbeck covered, or where exactly F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s 1920 journey south began in The Cruise of the Rolling Junk (New York, not Connecticut as he claims), or how much the experience of Sal Paradise reflects Jack Kerouac’s actual biography in On the Road (1957). The journey is always fictional as much as literal, the seemingly haphazard journeying and narrative coincidences deliberately constructed and shaped by the author. Gage’s book covers the major debates and transformations of American history from 1776 onwards; she tells us to “think of it as a U.S. history survey course, only more fun and interesting, because it’s happening out on the road.”

Gage’s turn to this genre at this point in her career is a smart choice. An academic historian known for her Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of J. Edgar Hoover, she has turned here to an informal, personal, and popular mode of writing history—and part of the attraction is her expert take on public history and heritage sites. “Historians tend to be myth-busters,” she writes, who “declare that things are not as they appear, that they’re messier than you think, and that some version of what people are experiencing today has actually happened before”: an occupation and worldview to which she subscribes. However, she notes, she wanted to remind herself why she studied history in the first place, setting off 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 their history.” Without naming any current politicians, it’s clear that there is a political impetus behind this journey: “Though you wouldn’t necessarily realize it from the state of our political discourse, it’s possible to hold both sets of ideas—to know your history and still love your country. Americans can be patriots and critics, citizens and dissenters, all at once.”

This is a book primarily about the ways that American history is interpreted in public spaces and sites. Through 13 chapters, Gage travels to approximately 300 historic locations, places that “are so often tasked with making collective narratives out of our imperfect past.” One museum president she meets refers to his museum as “‘a kind of laboratory’ for talking across difference.” Looking forward to the nation’s semiquincentennial, Gage’s narrative begins “where the nation did: in Philadelphia in 1776,” while the author acknowledges that she could have begun at many other moments or locations, even outside the United States. Nodding to the 1619 Project, Gage argues that it is a “mistake” to give up the date 1776 because of the implications of the United States’ founding documents in the codification of slavery. Each chapter is “not only about a place but also a moment in time,” with the chapters arranged chronologically rather than geographically, and limited—because of the mode of travel—to the continental United States.

Rather than emulating one of the “swaggering male protagonists” of the typical road trip, traveling for months on the open road, Gage organized her jaunts as five- to ten-day affairs, usually undertaken alone. She notes, in an understatement, the “bumps along the way,” which included cancer treatment and a broken collarbone as well as various other bodily and vehicular breakdowns. Her consequent realization that she is “definitively middle-aged” seems appropriate for a nation that is “not so young and spry itself anymore.” She assures us that she “tried to conduct [her] trips as any ordinary tourist would: rental cars, hotel rooms of varying quality, obedient strolls behind tour guides.” Her “only special qualification was [her] background as a historian,” which she hopes “allowed [her] to see and understand some things that others might miss.”

These insights are the book’s main contributions. Public history is, in many ways, much more difficult than academic history, especially in a country where debates about heritage can become explosive. I know from personal experience that the worst thing you can say to a docent or guide (who is often a volunteer) is that you teach whatever subject they are currently talking about. Thanks to a perceived (false) hierarchy between public and academic knowledge, the guide will typically jam up or look to you for confirmation of their information—with the great irony being that docents often have far more to tell about the lived experience of a place than academics, stuck at their ivoried desks, will ever know. Some of the most useful insights I’ve gleaned have come from visiting a home or site where an “amateur” enthusiast has clarified something or opened up a subject for me in a way that I hadn’t considered before. Drawing on the expertise of these anonymous guides, Gage’s task here is not an easy one—she seeks to balance scholarly debates around the places she visits with the experience of encountering these sites as “just another curious traveler.”

Gage also interrogates herself as a historical subject, a move many academic historians make at a certain point in their career, to greater or lesser degrees. “[E]ven my out-of-time childhood was rooted in a set of historical experiences: suburbanization, segregation, Jewish assimilation, the mid-century middle class,” she writes in the first chapter. The contents page—the style of which is borrowed from Auguste Levasseur’s 1829 text Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825: Or, A Journal of a Voyage to the United States—demonstrates this juxtaposition of the public and the personal, with, for example, “The Custers go west” followed by “I get duped.” At one point, Gage includes quotations from her childhood scrapbook from a school trip to Colonial Williamsburg; at another, she discusses meeting her first husband in Nashville, Tennessee.

Each of the 13 chapters “begins with a historical traveler—someone who started out in one place and ended up in another.” She begins with George Washington in 1789 and “his see-America idea” before moving on to cover her own journey to her hometown in Delaware County, Philadelphia: “I returned to Delco in search of the history I never knew, but also the history that I lived without quite knowing it.” At Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, she pays tribute to “the Park Service’s fleet of good-hearted, army-green-clad, campaign-hat-wearing rangers,” and meets a local guide who “spends most of his free time in the 1770s.” She has fun with Washington’s tent at the newish Museum of the American Revolution, where “visitors make their way through an entire tent-themed odyssey.” The “soaring music” and “sentimental commentary” finally reveal the tent, before it “disappears for a greenroom break in advance of its next performance.” She takes time to draw attention to the National Liberty Museum, created by a second-generation Polish immigrant, even if calling the museum world-class would be, in her words, “a stretch.”

The chapter on Virginia is particularly strong, exploring the place “where the nation’s founding dilemma lives and breathes.” Gage traces four different institutions’ engagement with the problem of representing and interpreting slavery, in sites where enslaved people often outnumbered their enslavers. She begins with Ona Maria Judge, the daughter of an enslaved woman at George Washington’s Mount Vernon—where, Gage tells us, there were “three times as many people enslaved […] as in the entire city of Philadelphia.” In detail, she analyzes how Colonial Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, James Madison’s Montpelier, and their relationships with enslaved people have been, and are now, interpreted for visitors, which makes for a particularly compelling chapter. She never condemns these institutions but clarifies what has been successful and what hasn’t. A 1994 reenactment of a slave auction at Colonial Williamsburg led to protests by the NAACP; a theater experience that asked visitors to take on the role of enslaved people produced “bafflement and outrage.” She considers the difference between referring to Mount Vernon as Washington’s “farm” or his “forced-labor camp.”

Gage notes that after Mount Vernon was turned into a tourist site, formerly enslaved people took paid jobs there, arguing that there was a “certain honesty in the approach.” She writes that histories of enslaved people in these sites are sometimes subsumed into tours or exhibits tucked away in basements and outbuildings, rather than featured in the main exhibitions. Regarding Sally Hemings, a case for which there are no visual records, Gage considers the ways she has been represented instead, noting that Monticello policy now mandates that visitors learn about the Hemings family. She notes the 2022 conflict about a board initiative at Montpelier that allowed descendants of those enslaved there to choose half of the seats for the site’s board of directors. And she notes the “friends and relatives and neighbors” of the Founding Fathers who participated in voluntary manumission, thanks to a 1782 Virginia law. Gage manages to cover all of this over the course of a single chapter.

The 13 chapters demonstrate Gage’s range, each displaying the same sharp critical skills regardless of the topic. The chapter on Tennessee focuses on Andrew Jackson’s role in “Indian removal” and his home state’s attempts to “make sense of that history,” calling out the Hermitage—Jackson’s home—for few displays on the topic. Gage visits Sequoyah Birthplace Museum, funded by the Tennessee Valley Authority as compensation for “flood[ing] Cherokee archaeological and burial sites” while building the Tellico Dam. She draws attention to the moment in the 1830s when expulsions and land loss were federal policy, when 80,000 Native people were expelled westward, and she makes a moving visit to Cherokee Removal Memorial Park. The chapter on Montana begins with her experience as a college student working on a ranch, not realizing, as she writes, that she “had been taken in by one of the greatest mythmaking machines in U.S. history […] that the West is America and America is the West,” which becomes the subsequent theme of the chapter. The chapter on California takes us from Disneyland to the presidential libraries of Richard Nixon (himself a devotee of Disney, apparently) and Ronald Reagan, to the unspecified “tumult of emotion” Gage experiences at the reconstructed Independence Hall at Knott’s Berry Farm.

Gage is (unsurprisingly) good on the ways in which history has repeatedly been rewritten and repurposed: much of the book is “about the ways Americans have invented and reinvented” their history—for example, Donald Trump’s choice of a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office turned “the venerable Democrat into a surprise 21st-century Republican.” She is great, too, on the actual experience of visiting a site, taking the reader with her as she describes what she sees and hears. Her commentary and wry asides are continuous without overwhelming her descriptions. At Mount Vernon, she watches a film about the Continental Army fighting the British, “an experience enhanced by vibrating seats, flashing lights, and a sprinkling of fake snow.” Montpelier, owned for a long time by the duPont family, “still has some of that horsey feel.” She frequently acknowledges her own blind spots: it takes her a minute to recognize that a guide who introduces himself as George is meant to be George Washington; she is surprised that Tennessee is cold in winter; she gets lost.

Of course, this expansive book can’t include everything—at one point, Gage apologizes to Graceland for its omission. She frequently gives us visitor numbers, but I would have been interested to see something about visitor demographics—who, precisely, is visiting these sites today, and what are the costs of admission? (Gage’s own travel was presumably paid via an academic research allowance.) How do state and national funding affect the day-to-day running of these historical sites? The book’s title, taken from Woody Guthrie’s 1940 song, is seemingly an implicit rebuke of the current administration’s attempt to restrict and control historical narratives, but this could be made more explicit. Gage’s critique of the Legacy Museum in Alabama is surprisingly negative, given the book’s generosity of spirit: she writes that, despite finding the exhibit powerful, she “came away somewhat uneasy about its nothing-much-changes message,” which seems to miss the museum’s point. It’s a bit surprising, too, not to see more about the monument wars that have dominated the recent historical landscape. But these are minor concerns in a book saturated with research and experience, all related with panache.

Gage’s trips around the US left her hopeful. “I came away from my travels,” she writes, “heartened about the state of our country.” Even in the places that recall the most painful parts of the past, she suggests, “there’s a quiet hope that next time we’ll do it better.” At the very least, she writes, traveling the country and learning about history “makes it harder to say that things today are worse than ever.” “For better or worse, public interest in history tends to peak at moments like ours, full of political debate, anxiety, and division,” Gage writes early on in the book—and there’s a sense that this book is a response to that interest, as well as a corrective to the current politically divisive climate. Her closing discussion of Connecticut, specifically New Haven (a city close to my own heart), implicitly reminds readers to look around them for the historical past, as her introduction reminded us that we are all historical subjects, made by history. Gage notes that she was surprised by how “intensely local” the history that she found was—that the great conflicts of a nation are played out on a local scale—and she praises the many citizen initiatives she saw.

By noting that “the nation intends to mark its 250th anniversary by chastising and defunding the very programs and institutions […] that make its history accessible,” the book offers an implicit defense of the individual’s role in carrying the torch of national memory. Gage doesn’t ultimately tell us if the sun is rising or setting, but in this account of the many people continuing to tell the United States’ story at historical sites across the nation, it’s hard not to see some rays peeking over the horizon.