This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History

Pulitzer Prize winner Gage (G-Man) offers a gregarious travelogue turned history lesson, turned lesson on how history is made. Gage energetically crisscrosses the U.S., visiting museums, reenactments, and other commemorations of major events and developments since the country’s founding. The narrative dances gracefully between Gage’s recapping of the events themselves and her wry commentary on the sometimes silly, sometimes moving, but always weirdly American ways they have come to be memorialized: The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, for instance, is a $165 million “tent-themed odyssey” culminating in a “light show” around a tent that George Washington slept in; San Antonio, meanwhile, will soon open a museum featuring the Alamo collection of British rock star Phil Collins, who became the world’s foremost collector of Alamo artifacts because he loved the Davy Crockett Disney show as a kid. Among the other topics covered are the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago; 1940s Los Alamos; and the 1955 opening of Disneyland. From her travels, she gamely draws the conclusion that “in every era, someone was sure that the moment of... collapse had finally arrived,” but that Americans, filled with a unique “anxiety that the country’s past might actually have been better than its future,” never stop agitating for progress that lives up to the country’s founding ideals. It’s a marvelous deep dive into the American psyche. (Apr.)