Beverly Gage grew up just outside of Philadelphia in the suburbs of Delaware County, known as Delco. Throughout her 1970s childhood, she visited Independence Hall, the Philadelphia landmark where the country’s founding fathers debated and signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
In her new book, “This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History” (Simon & Schuster), the Yale historian calls trips to such hallowed historic sites an American ritual, one “in which we visit the places where history happened to figure out who we are in the present.” The book debuted last week at #12 on The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list.
As part of her road trip, Gage visited 300 historic sites around the country in 2023 and ’24, including museums, parks, battlefields, and monuments, as a way to “explore, if not reconcile, the greatest tensions of American history.” Gage takes her readers along for a ride through 19 states, arranging the trips chronologically to follow the course of American history, from 1776 to the present.
Inspired by the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, the book is “about the conversation that has been happening over 250 years about what it means to be American, what the founding legacy is about, who gets to claim it, who gets to reinterpret it, and who gets to try to throw it away and invent something else,” Gage said in an interview.
Gage is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History, in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her book “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century” (Penguin Random House, 2023) won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, as well as the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography.
Last year she joined with two other Yale historians to teach the Devane Lecture course on “America at 250: A History.” (Those lectures may be viewed online at no charge.)
Gage sat down with Yale News to talk about mythmaking and national image, her fascination with rich businessmen who try to put their stamp on American history, and an overnight in a former nuclear missile silo.
At several stop-offs in your travels, you suggest that there were different iterations of or attempts at an American revolution, beyond the first one. Would you give some examples?
Gage: One of the many interesting things about American history is that people take the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, or the American Revolution and try to appropriate it, interpret it, use it for their own ends. Particularly for the first 100 years or so of American history, but even well after that. Lots of different kinds of groups said, you know, I am the heir to the American Revolution.
In Texas, when Texas broke away from Mexico in the 1830s, they said, we are the heirs of the American Revolution. The Confederacy said the same thing when it broke away from the nation in 1861. And then there were lots of social movements of varying sorts who have claimed that as well. The chapter on the Erie Canal is full of abolitionists and early women’s rights activists who are writing their own declarations and claiming a legacy of rebellion and reinvention. And you see it showing up in labor struggles in Chicago in the late 19th century, where anarchists are engaged in class struggle and saying, we are the heirs of Thomas Jefferson.
Many of the historical sites that you visited were set up to present an idyllic idea of the past. One of these is Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Are many of the sites you visited trying to present a more realistic view of the past these days, or is that an ongoing struggle?
Gage: Well, I think yes and yes. There is a lot of creativity and reinterpretation going on at these sites, and a lot of it is around grappling with the big dilemmas and problems and questions of the American past: slavery, racism, indigenous dispossession. There’s a lot more grappling with those forthrightly than you would have seen 20 or 30 years ago. But I went to an extremely wide array of sites, some of which are publicly funded and government run, some of which are commercial and private, some of which are expressly devoted to getting to the darkest parts of American history, and some of which, at their origins and even still today, are expressly devoted to a kind of cheerful heroic view of American history.
I do have a certain fascination with very rich businessmen in our past. Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Walt Disney — all decided at a certain point in their lives that what they wanted to do with their money, in part, was to put their stamp on how we tell the past. Rockefeller funded Colonial Williamsburg. Henry Ford created a whole village and museum that was really a testament to the period of his own childhood. Walt Disney built Disneyland around a sort of fantasy story of American history, particularly the era of his own childhood. I was interested in how and why those figures engaged history. And I was also very interested in this ongoing conversation we are having: was the past better than the present?
Some of these sites were set up as tourist attractions that were meant to provide entertainment. And you note that is especially true when it comes to places devoted to conjuring the spirit of the so-called Wild West.
Gage: My trip into various Western states — the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming — was really fascinating because they are places that take their own mythmaking so seriously. And it played a major role in creating the national image of the United States, especially in the late 19th century. For instance, in Deadwood, South Dakota, this former mining town that is now a historical reconstruction, they actually have a museum that is devoted to the town parade that is devoted to their glory years in the 1870s! They are proclaiming themselves one of these great symbols of the United States. Some places are engaged in mythmaking and they’re not very self-conscious about it. But the West, from Buffalo Bill Cody on, has been quite self-conscious about trying to tie itself to the nation, be a stand-in for the nation. And that, of course, means that it has a lot of the problems that the nation had: dispossession, the end of the frontier, the violence of conflicts between settlers as they came in and the native peoples who were already there.
Gage at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina.
Your visit to Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, proved especially poignant for reasons having to do with the symbolism of the American flag. Would you explain?
Gage: I wouldn’t have expected to have that kind of emotional experience at Fort Sumter. But one of the things that they do every day is raise the American flag. That’s partly because they’re a national park site. But it has an especially powerful meaning because in 1861, when the Civil War began, one of the first things that was done after Confederate forces took control of the fort was to take down the U.S. flag and put up the Confederate flag. Then, over the course of the war, the meaning of the American flag began to change. When the war ended, and the U.S. government went back to Fort Sumter to raise the American flag again, in that moment, it was a flag of liberation. It was a flag that stood for the end of slavery, and it was a flag that stood for the incredible sacrifice that had been required to remove that institution from American life. Lots of people who had been involved in that struggle for decades came to Fort Sumter for the flag raising in 1865. And when the flag gets raised at Fort Sumter now, it’s evoking that moment. It was really moving to be in a place where the flag stood for that kind of justice and liberation.
Probably the strangest thing you did on your trip was stay overnight in a former nuclear missile silo in Roswell, New Mexico. What was that like?
Gage: It was a little disturbing at first. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, as you would imagine. And I was staying in the Airbnb apartment there by myself. At one time, guards and maintenance staff lived inside the silo, so I was staying more or less where they would have lived. You climb down and down on these stairwells until you’re fully underground. My little apartment was right next to the silo itself, so I could walk across this hallway and onto a metal grated balcony that looks out over where the missile used to be. It’s a giant cavern covered with graffiti because local teenagers used to go down into the silos. I slept incredibly well in the apartment — there is no noise and no outside light.
At a nuclear missile silo in Roswell, New Mexico.
Finally, you observe at the beginning and end of the book that we’re at a moment where many Americans are wondering, as Ben Franklin supposedly wondered aloud at the Constitutional Convention, whether the sun is rising or setting on our republic. After your extensive journeys, what conclusions have you reached?
Gage: The first conclusion that I reached is that this is a question Americans have been asking for 250 years. In some ways, that question is the national tradition.
I also discovered that it’s very hard to know in our own historical moment how to judge what’s happening around you. One of the things that history does is give us some measures against which to judge our own time. But you have to really know that history. It can’t just be a matter of assuming that things were so great in the past and now they’re so horrible. I am a real skeptic of the idea that we are living through the worst and most divisive moment in American history. I don’t think that is true. I think there are some very particular things that are happening in the U.S. that are quite concerning, quite alarming, don’t bode so well for the future, but I think it is a form of historical amnesia to think that our problems are so much worse than what the country and its people have confronted over time.
The last thing I’ll say is that I think it’s helpful to go out physically, to get away from screens and explore the land, explore the people who are out there. I certainly came away more heartened about the state of the country than I would have had I just sat at home and read the news.
Beverly Gage will discuss her new book at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, April 22 at the Sterling Memorial Library (120 High St.). She will be in conversation with Elizabeth Hinton, the Class of 1954 Professor of History and Black Studies in FAS, and will be available to sign books after the event, which is free and open to the public.
