Review of This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage

Historian Beverly Gage chose thirteen pivotal places across our nation to illustrate key points in our history, explore our complicated path to the present day, and inspire our growing stronger as we face our past truths as well as our future. This is fascinating nonfiction, perfect to read during our nation's semiquincentennial year.

Beverly Gage is a lifelong historian who traveled across the United States in order to write this work highlighting key points in our history, unforgettable characters who shaped our past, various conflicts and cooperation, and our mistakes as well as hope for a better future.

She begins the book by reflecting on her youth and longtime interest in history, her travels as a young person, and the trips she has taken with her own, now college-aged child. She recalls her own dives into participating in history and celebrating our nation, including, endearingly, dressing up as a peanut for a bicentennial parade.

Gage doesn't focus only on the most popular or well known facts and landscapes; she offers thirteen essential places and their stories, which interconnect and build from each other, sharing context and fascinating details to bring it all to life. From museums to battlefield reenactments, historic sites to amusement parks, well-known places and under-the-radar spots, Gage inspects each of their places in our nation's complicated history.

Gage asks up front whether celebrating our spaces and places and feeling pride in our nation's strengths and triumphs can occur while we simultaneously recognize our failings, our cruelties, our paradoxes, and our mistakes.

This is far from a comprehensive history, nor is it intended to be. I found Gage's writing and perspective so engaging, I would have happily read a book twice this length. Yet I am fascinated and impressed by her disciplined whittling down of potential instructive locations to the thirteen she dives into here.

Gage asserts that our nation's history is complicated and fraught, and that this layered story of our collective past belongs to all of the groups who have lived on the land we call the United States. As current debates rage about how to tell the truths of our history, some groups fight to erase uncomfortable facts, shape the narrative to be softer, and omit painful historical failures. But Gage notes that every event, however painful, has built our country, that our stumbles and abject failures have inspired change, and that we are not finished growing. We can continue aiming to be better, do better, and take pride in our diverse nation, its checkered past, and its promising future.

This nonfiction work is perfect to read during our nation's semiquincentennial year.

I listened to this title as an audiobook through my library and Libby.

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Beverly Gage is also the author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror, and other books.

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