Yale professor Beverly Gage, who won a 2023 Pulitzer for her J. Edgar Hoover biography, G-Man, is an avid road tripper as well as historian. She spoke with PW about her forthcoming travelogue, This Land Is Your Land (Simon & Schuster, Apr.), and what she learned by viewing America’s complicated history through a car windshield.
What inspired your trip?
I’ve been going on history-themed road trips for decades. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is coming up, and I wanted to find a way to engage with that as a historian and also give Americans who want to get out and explore their country the context to do that. The book covers 13 historical sites in 13 chapters, from 1776 to the present.
How can road trippers incorporate historical context into their travels?
History can be an adventure in itself. We travel across geography, and the book tries to offer ways to do some time-traveling, too. One exciting thing about historical sites is that they’re a tangible way to immerse yourself in some other moment in which people contended with all the challenges of the world around them. I wanted the book to be accessible, so I didn’t do any special behind-the-scenes things—I visited places like Mt. Rushmore, the Alamo, Disneyland, and Mound Bayou, an autonomous Black town in the Mississippi Delta. Some are well established as capital-H history sites, some are almost unknown.
What surprised you along the way?
The connection between the local and the national. What struck me about the places I chose was how, at their moment of greatest visibility and vibrancy, they came to stand in for the country as a whole. For example: Dearborn, Mich. In the 1920s and ‘30s, people in the U.S. and in the rest of the world were looking to Dearborn, home of the Ford Motor Company, to see what America was.
You write, “So many people seem to object to the idea that Americans have a common history at all.” What does this mean?
For historians, challenging the idea of a nation-state as the only bucket of analysis is a long-standing tradition. We don’t all have a common history, but our histories are intertwined. I wanted to put the historical context back in the story and consider the ways people living near or far, with great power or a little, were thinking about each other, fighting each other, loving each other.
How does the idea of American exceptionalism figure into this?
One thing that drove me to explore America’s national identity is this ongoing debate about American exceptionalism—whether it should be embraced, dismissed, derided, championed. The story of the U.S. as an exceptional nation might come with some exceptional duties and commitments. One of my goals was to show that it’s possible to face the darkest parts of the nation’s past and still emerge with a love of country, to celebrate the best parts of history. One thing I see happening is that a whole lot of people say: there’s nothing to celebrate, I want no part of this. I want us to live up to the best aspirations.
