Gage: Dan Renzetti
This might be the ultimate blueprint for a history lover’s road trip: Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Beverly Gage ’94 (left), Yale’s John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History, is out with a new book about more than a dozen places across America—some famous, others obscure—that helped shape the nation’s birth and evolution.
This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip through US History begins at the beginning—in Gage’s home state of Pennsylvania—and tours through Colonial Williamsburg, Fort Sumter, the Alamo, and many smaller, privately run sites before ending at California's Disneyland, perhaps the ultimate expression of history as nostalgia.
Woven throughout are funny asides about companions and car troubles, along with historical anecdotes that capture both the grand arc and the blood-soaked chaos of US history. Derived from 300 trips made in 2023 and 2024, before 2025’s changes to National Park materials, it’s also a snapshot of how we saw our history just a few short years ago—and of how the present is always reinventing the past. Overall, “I came away more heartened about the state of the country,” says Gage, “than I would have had I just sat at home and read the news.”
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