Title: This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage
Book Beginning/First Line Friday snippet from the introduction:
If you grow up near Philadelphia, sooner or later you eventually end up at Independence Hall.
Friday56 snippet (from page 17, last page of preview)*:
Taken as a whole, the Philadelphia area yields a remarkably efficient tour of how, in a formal sense, the United States of America came to be. All the big characters are there: Washington, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lafayette. So are the key moments--Declaration, Revolution, Constitution--that Americans have been debating for two and half centuries. But it wasn't the big-ticket places that really spoke to me...What stayed with me, after I departed for a long drive up I-95, were the instances in which ordinary people looked to the founding legacy and made it their own.
*I listened to the audiobook, so this will have to suffice for my Friday56 entry.
Summary: Beverly Gage, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, embarks on a series of thirteen road trips around the U.S.A. to highlight important moments in the country's history. Gage visits museums, roadside attractions, reenactment sites, even souvenir stores. Some of the places she visited are well known sites (Independence Hall) and others are much more obscure (spending the night in a missle silo turned into an AirBnB). She doesn't try to tell a sanitized story of only heroic moments but also uses her road trips to point out places and events that highlight our country's challenges and mistakes. The words of the Declaration of Independence that gave birth to a new nation in 1776 have been consistent touchstones over the years since, but various people and groups have embraced the Declaration and molded its powerful words to fit a particular viewpoint or support causes across the political spectrum. Gage shows that Americans can honestly face their history -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- and still love their country.
Review: Don and I were on our own road trip when we listened to the audiobook of This Land is Your Land, going on a virtual audio road trip around all regions of the US. Our destination was coincidentally also an historic site - Yellowstone, the nation's first National Park.
Beverly Gage is a history professor at Yale University in Connecticut. Last year she and two other professors joined together to teach a course titled "America at 250: a History." No doubt Gage was able to use information she gleaned to write this book to teach the class. Her writing style is very accessible and engaging. She is a good storyteller, often personalizing her experiences on the road. She usually traveled alone but her college-aged son joined her on several trips. He was accustomed to family trips with multiple mandatory stops at historical sites along the way. Gage explained how she was always taking notes about what she was learning. Since it took several years to make her thirteen road trips, she experienced some personal challenges along the way, like a car that was acting up and needing time off for cancer treatments. I especially liked how Gage engaged with her material. This is anything but a sterile, textbook-style account of what she discovered on the road.
Benjamin Franklin supposedly wondered aloud at the Constitutional Convention, whether the sun is rising or setting on our republic. In an interview for the YaleNews, Gage was asked for her conclusion on this same question. I love her answer so much I'm sharing it here:
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 (YaleNews).
Gage also urged her readers to get off their computers and go out and visit new places around the country. Talk with the people. She feels much more heartened about the state of the nation since her trips. Don wished aloud at the end of book that everyone in America would read this book for the country's 250th birthday. It is true. One can love their country and acknowledge it has problems.
We both rated this book 5 stars.
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