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Phoebe Neidl: Hello, listeners. I'm Phoebe Neidl, an editor here at Audible. As you may know, 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And we're going to talk about it today, among other things, with my guest Beverly Gage, a professor of history at Yale University and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of G-Man, a biography of J. Edgar Hoover. Her new book, This Land Is Your Land, takes us on a road trip through US history. Welcome, Beverly.
Beverly Gage: Thanks, Phoebe. It's great to be here.
PN: Thank you so much for joining us. And first of all, congratulations on winning a Pulitzer for G-Man. I know that was a book you researched for years, so that must have felt incredible. So, to get started, I'm just sort of curious how writing this book compared to that one. This one seems more personal in a way, told in first person and structured around trips you took to historic sites across the US.
BG: They are, in fact, very different books and very different writing processes, although they were related for me. As you said, I worked on the J. Edgar Hoover biography for more than a decade, and so that was a lot of time sitting alone at a desk, going over papers, thinking about this one strange and interesting man. When that ended, I really wanted to do something different, and I started looking ahead to 2026 and thinking about the ways that, as a historian but as someone who specializes in the 20th century, I could engage this big moment in American history. So, I turned to this concept of a set of road trips that get from 1776 all the way up to where we are now, as a very different method but something that would be fun and engaging, but serious history, too.
PN: There was a line that struck me in your chapter on North Dakota. You say of Deadwood that “its transition from a place of violence and conflict to a marketable legend happened fast.” That line struck me because it felt applicable to a lot of the places you visit for this book, like the Alamo or Southern plantations. This Land Is Your Land felt to me like a meditation on the tension between this sort of repackaged, simplified, tourist’s view of history that we see on plaques and memorials and a more scholarly, nuanced view of the past. What did you learn about America by exploring that tension?
BG: You're absolutely right that conflict is at the heart of this story, and it's the conflict about what the United States is and could be as a nation. It's a set of conflicts that happened in many of these places that I go to visit across the country. And then it is also a conflict about how we tell and remember that history. So, I'm trying to do all of those things at once in this book and also tell a little bit of a story about road trips themselves and what they mean for the American past.
PN: I mean, this is a perfect road trip listen in audiobook form. Anybody who's taking a road trip, this would absolutely be a phenomenal listen. But as we mentioned, this is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and you wrote this book with that in mind. We all know these words so well, but I am going to quote them here anyway: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Woo, I mean, that is some blood-stirring stuff still, right? [laughs]. It's so powerful. And reading your book makes me think about how America has been battling over what those words mean ever since they were written. It's been a lot of wrangling over what is liberty exactly and who's entitled to it. To what extent do you think the struggle and debate over how to fulfill those words is the best framework for understanding American history as a whole?
BG: It's certainly one of the frameworks for the stories that I'm telling in the book. So, not only this question of whether or not the United States understands and lives up to those founding ideals, but also a story about all the different kinds of people with very different agendas who have taken those words, the Constitution, the Declaration, the image of the American Revolution, the founders, the Liberty Bell, all of those early symbols of the American nation, and repackaged them, repurposed them, and made use of them for their own ideas and causes. So, I really think of the book as a conversation across place and across time about what this country is really all about.
"I think that it is incumbent upon all of us to think about what we actually love about the country that we're in, what we value about it, and how we want to see it realize its best ideals. And the book is full of people who were really weighing exactly that set of equations."
PN: Do you think it's fair to say that you're making a sort of plea for balance in this book, that the US shouldn't be erasing aspects of its past that it would rather not face, but that we also shouldn't completely define ourselves by our sins either?
BG: I think that that's right. I was really concerned going into 2026 that our public discourse is dominated by two ways of thinking about history. One is that if you love America, you have to only say good things about it. You ought to be jettisoning or ignoring the much more difficult parts of the American past. The other was that the really difficult parts of the past are the only things that matter, and you don't need to engage in some other way as well.
I was actually really disheartened when I began to talk to people about 2026, and they said, "Oh, yeah, right, celebrate America? No way." And I'm certainly not a fan of misinformed or dogmatic celebration of any sort. I think patriotism can be a complicated concept for sure, but I also think that it is incumbent upon all of us to think about what we actually love about the country that we're in, what we value about it, and how we want to see it realize its best ideals. And the book is full of people who were really weighing exactly that set of equations, and looking at each other, looking at the past, looking at the future, and trying to figure out the right balance.
PN: One of the things this book made me aware of or made me think about is how we so often only know a tiny fragment of an historical figure's story. You write, "Even the stories of individual heroes tend to be more complicated when you turn the page." Was there an historical figure you came across during these road trips that most surprised you once you looked at the full scope of their lives?
BG: This is not an answer that I would've expected to give when I set out on these road trips, but the person who comes to mind is David Crockett, better known as Davy Crockett, who I had only ever thought about as sort of the figure from the Disney series or as one of these kind of myths and legends. But he turned out to be interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One is that he was the only member of the Tennessee congressional delegation who in the 1830s voted against Indian removal. He was a big friend of Andrew Jackson's, and this was Andrew Jackson's signature issue, but Crockett said what many Americans were saying at the time, which is, "This is unjust, it's unnecessary, and how can we claim to be a nation of liberty if we're going to engage in this kind of violence and dispossession?" Who knew, right?
Then I got also very interested in him as a kind of model for what I see a lot of Americans doing, which is when something doesn't work out in one place, you pick up and you move somewhere else and you give it another try. In Crockett's case, when his political career fell apart in Tennessee, he famously picked up and went to Texas. Things did not work out so well for him in Texas because he died at the Alamo not long after he got there, but he was actually the character that made me think that I wanted to find people who had done that sort of thing as a way to introduce each chapter, who moved from one place to another place, brought what they had discovered and felt and experienced in one setting to a different setting in the United States.
PN: Yeah, that's so interesting. A piece of history that I was so unfamiliar with was what happened to Sitting Bull after “Custer's Last Stand.” I didn't realize he had been, some years later, shot down by police in his own home. And then a few months later, people came knocking from the World's Fair in Chicago asking his family if they could take his cabin, even though his family was still living in it, to present it at the Chicago World Fair. That was both a horrifying and fascinating story to me, and I had never heard that before. A lot of times, these people, we only know their most famous moment that we talk about, this mythologized bit of their history, and when you look at the broader span, it tells a fuller picture, for sure.
BG: One other set of people who really drove that home for me was there's a chapter on civil rights history, mostly in Alabama and Mississippi. A lot of famous figures come up in that chapter, Rosa Parks being one example. They are figures who tend to pop up in our history for one glorious moment. In her case, Montgomery and the bus boycott, and then very few people know what happens afterwards. In a lot of those cases, some of the great figures of the movement were driven pretty quickly out of the South. So, Rosa Parks, by the late 1950s, has moved to Detroit because her life has become sort of unlivable. She can't find work in Alabama. Weirdly, the Rosa Parks bus, the bus where she refused to give up her seat, is also now in a museum outside of Detroit, Michigan. So, it was itself a story about the kind of strange exchanges and passages that happen in this kind of history.
PN: When you thought about the audience for this book, who did you have in mind, and what do you hope that listeners take away from it?
BG: Well, it's really a book for general readers. I think of it as a teaching book of a sort, which is to say that it is meant to just give people a way to engage with history that I thought might be fun and interesting as well as serious and taking on big questions. I thought a lot about my own travels with my son when he was growing up. He's now a college graduate. But when he was growing up, we used to do these trips together a lot, and it was really interesting to see him learn about American history this way. So, I partly had in mind parents and their kids. I wanted to write a book that, in its audio form especially, the whole family, let's say seventh grade and up, could listen to together as they were taking trips, getting out into the world, seeing some of the sites that are being described in the book.
PN: Yeah, I love that. That feels perfect, and I loved Nick's appearances throughout the book and that he's now giving historical tours, walking tours and stuff in Washington, DC, which sounds so perfect. You did your job well.
BG: It’s true. It caught on.
PN: Yeah, you definitely infected him with the history bug. Speaking of it being a fun listen, I do want to talk about the audio. You do a marvelous job narrating the introductory chapter of the book. And as I said, because it's a bit more of a personal book than your last one, did you consider narrating the whole thing yourself or did you know that because Gabra Zackman did such a phenomenal job on G-Man, that you had to have her back for this one?
BG: Yes, and yes. So, I did entertain the idea of reading the whole thing myself, but I loved what Gabra did with G-Man. I thought it was just terrific. So, I thought that she might be a really good stand-in. But because it is a personal book, it's not mostly a memoir but it has lots of personal stuff in there, from the breaking down of my Subaru to my own wrestling with what it means to be an American, I wanted to play some role in that. So, as you said, I read the introduction. I found that really fun and engaging. The rest of the book was already done when I did that, or I might have entertained the idea of just continuing on.
"One premise of this book is that you can, in fact, know your history and still love your country, that you can be a patriot and a dissenter at the same time."
PN: Yeah, it was great. Yours was great and Gabra was great. She has this very authoritative and confident way of being able to read nonfiction, but it still sounds chummy, you know? There's something still kind of casual enough about it that it's just a joy to listen to. She did a fabulous job. Tell me about how you settled on the title and why did it feel thematically right for you, this reference to a Woody Guthrie song?
BG: The title is This Land Is Your Land, so that comes from Woody Guthrie's 1940s anthem. And what I liked about it was that that is a song that simultaneously is a celebration of the United States—and I think that's the way most people encounter it—but it's also a protest song. He was a dissident, he was a protestor, he was very concerned about what the United States was doing in the Depression and the coming of the Second World War, and so it captured both parts of that. One premise of this book is that you can, in fact, know your history and still love your country, that you can be a patriot and a dissenter at the same time, and Woody Guthrie really was that.
It's also sort of an invitation to people to get out and see this land, because I think it's unfortunate that many of us are encountering each other or these stories about history primarily through sitting alone at home and looking at screens. I wanted to capture the welcome and the invitation and the prod to get out there and see things for yourself.
PN: Yeah, especially in this day and age when so many people spend so much time in front of a screen. It does come across in your book, kind of the serendipity that is allowed to happen when you're out in the world, and the people you talk to and how they come into this story. I really enjoyed that aspect of it. So, this book shows how politically motivated a lot of commemorative history can be. But do you think that this kind of public history can also play a positive role in shaping the national identity? And can you think of a monument or a museum that you think really nails it, that you think hits the right note or approach in telling our national story?
BG: A lot of these places are telling stories that are both local and national. That's sometimes a tough balance to strike. I will tell you two very different places that come to mind as being both a little bit off the beaten path and then also places that really have something special in that combination of the local and the national. One, which I didn't write about actually all that much, was the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, which is a new museum that's opened in Jackson, Mississippi, in the last decade, and that really tries to take on some of the biggest questions of Mississippi history, in a place where that history is still extremely contested. So that's sort of an example of a state wrestling with its own past and its significance.
Another place that comes to mind, and I don't know if it's exactly a model in the way that you're talking about, but that I really enjoyed going, was Medora, North Dakota, which is a tiny little town in North Dakota that is primarily interested in the history of Theodore Roosevelt, who spent several months in the Badlands before he became a national figure or before he became president, and [he] described those experiences as really being formative. I think what was interesting about Medora is that it's really being self-conscious about trying to make that connection between the local and the national. This is their one shot at doing it, and so they have a rosier view of Theodore Roosevelt and his era than I do, but I really found the kind of spirit and the impulse very charming and engaging when I was there.
PN: Nice. There's a couple more places I gotta visit on my bucket list. Those sound great. In the epilogue, you mentioned how studying history gives you some existential comfort, and I completely agree, and for the same reason you state, that it's a reminder that we have gotten ourselves out of some big messes before, and so it leaves me with some hope that we can do it again. And while we can't predict the future of this country and what's to become of it, we can ask, what's next in your future? Did this book help generate some new avenues of research for you to pursue? What's next for you in general, or what are you looking forward to?
BG: Well, the book did send me down all sorts of rabbit holes that then produced a long list of, "Oh, maybe someday I'll write this book, and maybe someday I'll write this book." Those are on the back burner. The book that I am writing next is a biography of Ronald Reagan, who appears as a character in the last chapter of the book. I knew that that was going to be my next project, but when I was finishing the biography of J. Edgar Hoover, I thought I need a little break in between those two. And so that's part of where This Land Is Your Land came from.
I do have a couple of sequels in mind if it turns out that people like this kind of book. One would be traveling the world to look at what other places say about the United States and the moments that they intersected with its history, which I think would be really fun.
PN: So interesting.
BG: I also have thought about writing a book that's really about Washington, DC, which is not a city that I visit in this book, but is, of course, the place that so many people come to find out about and to fight about and contest our history.
PN: Those both sound amazing. You can sign me up for those. Are you an audiobook fan yourself, and do you have any favorites that you would recommend to our listeners?
BG: I really love audiobooks. I listen to them all the time. Sometimes it's a good way to prep for classes. I use them for all sorts of things. Going to bed at night. I guess one audiobook that comes to mind that is not especially related to all the topics in this book, but is really related to my work on J. Edgar Hoover, is Ben McIntyre's book A Spy Among Friends, which is the story of Kim Philby, who was this British diplomat and intelligence officer who was also a Soviet spy and then defected to the Soviet Union. So, it was a great British narrator—for some reason that's really the voice of authority—but it's also just a wonderful kind of historical mystery story. I loved that audiobook.
PN: I think that's already on my to-be-listened-to list, actually. I love spy stuff. I'm just finishing up one called The Invisible Spy about the British spy ring at Rockefeller Center now, so that sounds right up my alley. I'll definitely check that out. Is there anything else that you think listeners should know about or that you want to express about this book that we haven't touched on?
BG: I just hope that people use this book as a template to head out on the road themselves, explore some places that they might not otherwise explore, find out about some history that doesn't necessarily make it into the textbooks, and think about what they want 2026 to mean for themselves.
PN: I love that. Thank you so much. Thank you for your time today, Beverly. I'm so excited for people to listen to this book. And listeners, you can get This Land Is Your Land by Beverly Gage on Audible now.
