This Land is Your Land
A Road Trip Through U.S. History
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Apr 7, 2026
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Pulitzer Prize–winning author of G-Man and acclaimed historian Beverly Gage takes the ultimate road trip into the American past.
Ride along with Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Beverly Gage as she travels the country to see the museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, reenactments, and souvenir shops where Americans learn—and fight—about our history. From the birth of the nation in Philadelphia to Disneyland and the California dream, This Land Is Your Land offers a guided tour of thirteen places and thirteen key moments that define America’s greatest successes and challenges.
The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a document that proclaimed the liberty and equality of all human beings, but produced a country that often failed to agree upon—or live up to—those ideals. This Land Is Your Land is for everyone who wants to find that history—to experience it and confront it, to celebrate it and condemn it—in the places where it happened.
Gage shows that Americans can face their past and still love their country. Toss the book in the back seat—or listen on audio with the windows down—and join the journey.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
