On the Road Again
This Land is Your Land by Beverly Gage (Simon & Schuster, 2026)
Reviewed by Christian McNamara
In an early chapter of This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History, a new book by the Yale historian Beverly Gage, Gage sets off for San Antonio to view a trove of Alamo artifacts belonging to the British rock star Phil Collins. Collins, it seems, grew up a devotee of the 1950s Disney series Davy Crockett starring Fess Parker (that makes two of us). Inspired by the show’s depiction of Crockett’s heroic demise alongside the other beleaguered defenders of the Alamo, Collins has amassed one of the leading collections of relics from the battle. These treasures are now on display at the Ralston Family Collections Center, a museum that opened in 2023 in the shadow of the Alamo Church, and Gage is determined to see them. Despite setbacks including a car breakdown, a nearly missed flight, and a bout of stomach flu, Gage finally makes it to San Antonio. Her verdict on the new museum? “[L]ong on stuff but short on interpretation” (71). Sadly, this is an assessment that will acquire new resonance for readers as they make their way through the book itself.
As its subtitle implies, This Land Is Your Land has its origins in a series of road trips that Gage undertook in 2023 and early 2024, typically alone but occasionally accompanied by her college-aged son or fellow-historian boyfriend. Gage, who won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, sees in the approaching semiquincentennial an opportunity to “step out of the proverbial ivory tower and check in with the past as it exists here and now, in the third decade of the 21st century” (xvii). So she makes her way to thirteen places – cities, states, regions – “where the key questions of American history intensified at a certain moment, and where Americans today are wrestling with how to understand and interpret what happened” (xix). Many of the usual suspects are here – the Philadelphia and Virginia of the Founding, Confederate South Carolina, Civil Rights-era Alabama and Mississippi. But others are omitted. There is no Boston or Washington, D.C. In their place are areas that may not seem as obviously “historical,” but for whose significance in the American story Gage makes a persuasive case. To take one such example, Gage shows how upstate New York became a hot bed for 1840s social movements including abolitionism and women’s rights that affected the country at large.
Each place Gage visits receives its own chapter. In them, she dutifully records information about the historical sites she visits: How they came to be preserved (often by civic-minded women at a time when those women would have been legally prohibited from shaping the nation’s history themselves). What types of exhibits they now contain (heavy on serious narration and soaring orchestral scores). How the sites have dealt with the problematic elements in their histories such as slavery and the displacement of Indigenous peoples (originally by ignoring them but now usually – though not always–with greater attention). Along the way, the reader gets a basic introduction to some of the critical moments and movements in American history. Many of these moments and movements will already be familiar to anyone who has taken an introductory U.S. history course. Yet there are under-told stories here as well, such as that of Mound Bayou, Mississippi – a self-governing black community founded by former slaves in the 1880s that Theodore Roosevelt once described as the “Jewel of the Delta.”
But what is one to take away from all of this? For her part, Gage notes in a short epilogue that she ended her travels feeling “heartened about the state of our country – or at least more heartened than I might have been had I stayed home, doomscrolling through the news” (264). Americans, she concludes, “are still engaged with discovering, documenting, reinventing, and showing off our history” (264).
Are “we” (defined broadly to include ordinary Americans and not simply professional historians and museum curators) actually that engaged with our history though? And with what effect? Is anything Gage encounters planting the seeds of historical passion in the way that Davy Crockett (despite its clear imperfections) did for the young Phil Collins?
Perhaps the biggest absence from This Land Is Your Land is any real sense of the present-day people Gage meets along the way. She mentions, but shows little apparent interest in, an intriguing cast of characters. A troupe of English country-dance reenactors. A Mount Vernon tour guide who emigrated from Ghana. A self-described “old Confederate.” The reader cries out to know more about these individuals and why, in our disembodied, future-obsessed, digital age they have chosen to plant their feet so firmly in the physical past. In one unintentionally symbolic encounter, Gage and her son receive a personal tour from a docent whose name tag reads simply “Volunteer.” And in the ensuing brief account of their interactions, that is the name she uses for him. Gage presumably intends this to be cheeky and fun, but one can’t help seeing in it an encapsulation of her inability to bring modern people to life on the page. This inability undermines the book’s project. What is American history, after all, but the ongoing story of her people? And how can we “check in with the past as it exists here and now” without some understanding of how contemporary Americans are actually engaging with it and the lessons to be learned from that engagement?
To be clear, This Land Is Your Land is not a bad book. Gage’s spotlighting of lesser-known historical sites that readers will want to add to their personal road trip bucket lists on the strength of her descriptions is a particular high point. But it is a book that had the potential to be better than it ultimately is. One hopes that Gage takes another crack at realizing this potential in a future work and finds herself, like the great American Willie Nelson, on the road again.
Christian McNamara recently relocated to his home state of Florida with his wife and two children. He has worked as a researcher and lecturer at the Yale School of Management, an attorney, a social sector consultant, and the executive director of a small youth development non-profit. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Harvard Law School.
