The Expert as Tourist | Los Angeles Review of BooksThe Expert as Tourist<br>Beverly Gage takes a road trip through historic sites from 1776 to today, discovering optimism for our political future along the way.<br>By Alice KellyJuly 2, 2026<br>History
Cultural Studies
This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage. Simon & Schuster, 2026. 352 pages.Buy on Bookshop.org
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YALE HISTORIAN Beverly Gage begins her road trip through the United States with a visit to Independence Hall in her hometown of Philadelphia, the site of many childhood visits. In her new book This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History, she describes George Washington’s chair from the Constitutional Convention, with its “half-round sun, its rays peeking out over the horizon, carved into the wood and painted in gold.” Benjamin Franklin pondered at the time “whether that sun was rising or falling on the nation that had been created.” Gage notes that “we are once again at a moment when many Americans are wondering if the sun is rising or setting over our republic.” “Like many Americans,” she tells us, “I grew up on the progress story”: the idea that the future would be better than the past, that the US was slowly becoming more egalitarian. For a variety of reasons, she writes, many Americans are now questioning the truth of that narrative. Her road trip—or, rather, series of trips—across the country is a means of reckoning with the state of the nation on its semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Like her childhood trips to historical sites, Gage suggests that this is “part of an American ritual, in which we visit the places where history happened to figure out who we are in the present.”
Like an old station wagon, the road trip genre is reliable and familiar: a means of finding cultural identity and memory through a physical journey. Even though Gage reminds us that the American road trip predates the automobile, the specifically American take on this genre, I would argue, involves the car. My personal favorite—and Gage’s too, it seems—is Travels with Charley (1962), John Steinbeck’s chronicle of his 1960 trip with his poodle “in search of America”—which Gage would have liked to replicate, except that her dog Scooby “detests” cars. (The subtitle of the UK edition of Gage’s book seemingly also gestures to Steinbeck’s title: “On a Road Trip to Make Sense of America.”) Road trip narratives are, of course, fictionalized to some extent: readers have picked apart exactly how many miles Steinbeck covered, or where exactly F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s 1920 journey south began in The Cruise of the Rolling Junk (New York, not Connecticut as he claims), or how much the experience of Sal Paradise reflects Jack Kerouac’s actual biography in On the Road (1957). The journey is always fictional as much as literal, the seemingly haphazard journeying and narrative coincidences deliberately constructed and shaped by the author. Gage’s book covers the major debates and transformations of American history from 1776 onwards; she tells us to “think of it as a U.S. history survey course, only more fun and interesting, because it’s happening out on the road.”
Gage’s turn to this genre at this point in her career is a smart choice. An academic historian known for her Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of J. Edgar Hoover, she has turned here to an informal, personal, and popular mode of writing history—and part of the attraction is her expert take on public history and heritage sites. “Historians tend to be myth-busters,” she writes, who “declare that things are not as they appear, that they’re messier than you think, and that some version of what people are experiencing today has actually happened before”: an occupation and worldview to which she subscribes. However, she notes, she wanted to remind herself why she studied history in the first place, setting off to “explore the museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, monuments, living-history pageants, battlefield reenactments, and souvenir shops where Americans so often go to learn—and fight—about their history.” Without naming any current politicians, it’s clear that there is a political impetus behind this journey: “Though you wouldn’t necessarily realize it from the state of our political discourse, it’s possible to hold both sets of ideas—to know your history and still love your country. Americans can be patriots and critics, citizens and dissenters, all at once.”
This is a book primarily about the ways that American history is interpreted in public spaces and sites. Through 13 chapters, Gage travels...