“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.

Five Takeaways
• Out of the Library and Into the Subaru. After winning the Pulitzer for G-Man, Gage drove across America in thirteen trips. Six months on the road. The car broke down constantly.
• Historians Don’t Think Enough About Geography. The Virginia presidents were neighbours. The Erie Canal was a reform corridor. Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony lived near each other.
• Disneyland Is a Parable About American History. Main Street USA is Walt Disney’s childhood. Frontierland is the heroic past. Tomorrowland is Cold War optimism.
• The Third Road Between Pride and Shame. Some Americans told her: celebrate the country. Others said: only say the good stuff. Her book lives in the tension.
• Upstate New York Reimagined America. Douglass and Anthony as neighbours. Writing their own constitutions. Rethinking the Declaration.

About the Guest
Beverly Gage is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale.

References
This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through US History by Beverly Gage
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: out of the library, into the Subaru
00:01:57 Why a road trip? The 250th anniversary approaches
00:04:18 Growing up in suburban Philadelphia, displaced
00:05:32 Goldberger becomes Gage: a father’s anglicised name
00:07:46 This Land Is Your Land: Woody Guthrie as frame
00:08:18 Historians don’t think enough about geography
00:11:27 The places most people have never heard of
00:13:42 Disneyland and the parable of American history
00:15:49 Lafayette, Tocqueville, and the great travel tradition
00:17:25 Thirteen trips, six months on the road
00:20:22 Crisis, catastrophe, and the opportunity for change
00:23:21 The apocalyptic temptation: from left and right
00:25:13 Civil rights cities that fell on hard times
00:31:36 The third road: between pride and shame
00:33:35 Upstate New York: Douglass, Anthony, and the neighbours who reimagined America