Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum

What stories does America tell about its own history? Pulitzer Prize winning author Beverly Gage set out to answer that question in her new book, This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History. Across 13 chapters, Gage road tripped through different parts of America, from Independence Hall to the Badlands of North Dakota, to see how Americans think about their past across museums, tours and, of course, all the many inexplicable gift shop tchotkes. Join Gage and her son Nick, her part-time road trip companion, for a conversation about driving through 250 years of America’s ups, downs and everything in between.

This event is co-presented by the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum and Unscripted Tours. Copies of This Land is Your Land will be available for purchase at the event through Politics and Prose.

Beverly Gage teaches American history at Yale. Her book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Bancroft Prize in American History, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography. She is also the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror, and writes for numerous journals and magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Her most recent book, This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History, was published in April.

Nick Perkins is the NYC Operations and Development Manager for Unscripted Tours, which is a fancy way of saying he writes and leads walking tours in New York City. His writing has appeared in Jacobin and The Nation. He is also a side character in This Land is Your Land, though his main moment in the book is when he gets Covid in California.

About This Land is Your Land:
Ride along with Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Beverly Gage as she travels the country to see the museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, reenactments, and souvenir shops where Americans learn—and fight—about our history. From the birth of the nation in Philadelphia to Disneyland and the California dream, This Land Is Your Land offers a guided tour of thirteen places and thirteen key moments that define America’s greatest successes and challenges.The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a document that proclaimed the liberty and equality of all human beings, but produced a country that often failed to agree upon—or live up to—those ideals. This Land Is Your Land is for everyone who wants to find that history—to experience it and confront it, to celebrate it and condemn it—in the places where it happened.Gage shows that Americans can face their past and still love their country. Toss the book in the back seat—or listen on audio with the windows down—and join the journey.