This Land Is Your Land: Exploring American History for the Semiquincentennial

Finally, someone else who is excited about the Semiquincentennial!

We’re only a month away from the American Semiquincentennial—and it seems like nobody cares. I feel cheated. This could be the only major American history anniversary that I get to experience. I missed the Bicentennial by sixteen years, and if I make it to the Tricentennial I will be eighty-two. But, aside from the too-partisan official celebrations, our country seems to be welcoming its 250th anniversary with a collective yawn.

Part of the problem, of course, is that history has gotten so polarized and political in recent years, often falling into one of two extreme and conflicting narratives. One is the heroic narrative of America the Great; the other is the hypercritical narrative of America the Evil. Both, in my opinion, overemphasize selective historical aspects while ignoring others. Both discourage anyone from digging deeper and discovering that the past is messy, complicated, and doesn’t always fit neatly into any sweeping narrative.

Historical sites are caught in the middle of these debates about narrative. How should they be interpreted? Which sites should be preserved? Which should be ignored? My opinion, of course, is that we should preserve as much as possible—the good, the bad, and the ugly—whether or not it fits neatly into the currently popular narrative. Narratives can and will change, but once a historical building or artifact is gone, it’s lost forever.

That’s why I was happy to see Beverly Gage’s new book This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History (Simon & Schuster, 2026). I knew I had to read it as soon as I saw the title, because I love both history and road trips and have gone on quite a few historical road trips myself. I was very curious to see how a Yale historian interprets these sites in today’s polarized environment, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a nuanced, thoughtful perspective.

Gage focuses, as one would expect for such an ambitious topic, on the aspects of American history that make it into textbooks. She starts out in Philadelphia, visiting Independence Hall and Valley Forge, then heads to Virginia and discusses how historical sites grapple with how to interpret slavery. She visits the Trail of Tears, the Alamo, Fort Sumter, Little Bighorn, George Pullman’s neighborhood in Chicago, the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, Greenfield Village, Los Alamos, Montgomery, and even Disneyland. Though many of the events and sites are familiar, what keeps the book moving is her ability to retell the historical stories in an engaging way while weaving in her observations on what the sites look like now.

As is typical for general American history, the emphasis is predominately on sites having to do with race issues, with some on class and gender. There isn’t much on agricultural or environmental history. But that leaves space for me and others to write about our road trips through those lesser-known—but still critically important—histories. In the meantime, I hope this book will help more people get excited about American history in general and the Semiquincentennial in particular. As Gage says in her epilogue:

Traveling the country and learning about history can provide some existential comfort, since it shows that Americans have managed to get themselves out of big messes before. At the very least it makes it harder to say that things today are worse than ever. Among its other fine qualities, the past offers tools for thinking about how to create change in situations where the odds look daunting….Whether we like it or not—this big, cruel, and transcendent country of ours—we’re in it together. Let’s make of it what we can.