“You can face your history and still love your country. This is my attempt at doing that.” — Beverly Gage
When the Yale Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage finished her almost nine-hundred-page biography of J. Edgar Hoover, she needed a little break before starting her next book on Ronald Reagan. So she got in her old Subaru and spent six months on the road driving across America to prepare for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The result of these thirteen separate road trips is This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through US History. Gage’s Subaru broke down constantly. So, from time to time, did her health. But the American history she uncovered is anything but broken down.
Historians, Gage argues, don’t think enough about geography. Visiting the homes of the first four US Presidents from Virginia, she saw how closely America’s slaveholding elite actually lived. Driving through the small towns on the Erie Canal, she found the corridor where abolitionism, women’s rights, temperance, and reform Christianity were all born. At Disneyland, the final chapter in her road trip, she went to the Abraham Lincoln stage show and imagined Main Street USA as Walt Disney’s parable about US history. The gap between the imagined America and the real one (yes, there is a real one, she insists) is where true history lives.
Gage’s thesis is that there is a third road — too much of a backstreet these days — between American pride and shame in its history. Her book maps that path. You can face up to your history, she argues, and still love your country. In a moment when inane triumphalism and apocalyptic despair dominate America’s sense of itself, Gage’s quiet historical reflection feels like the rarest of national commodities. Ben Franklin wondered in 1787 if the sun was rising or setting on America. Two hundred and fifty years later, Beverly Gage got in her Subaru and went on the road to find out.
