What does America’s past look like when you stop reading about it—and start traveling through it?
In This Land Is Your Land, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage journeys across the country, visiting battlefields, museums, monuments, historic homes, reenactments, and even Disneyland to see how Americans tell the story of their nation.
Along the way, she encounters competing versions of history: George Washington as both revolutionary hero and enslaver, the Alamo as both legend and complicated political struggle, and landmarks that celebrate American progress while revealing the people left out of the original story.
Rather than choosing between patriotism and criticism, Gage asks whether the two can coexist. Her travels reveal a country still wrestling with slavery, Indigenous displacement, civil rights, labor struggles, war, and the meaning of freedom itself.
Read the Instaread summary of This Land Is Your Land to discover what America’s historic places reveal about the nation—and who gets to tell its story.
