Our Land with Beverly Gage

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - SiriusXM and Atlas Obscura

Historian Beverly Gage explores American history through 13 iconic sites in her book 'This Land is Your Land.' Her road trip reveals how public memory, patriotism, and national identity are shaped by places from Philadel

Key takeaways

• History is lived through physical spaces and shared experiences.

Transcript preview

I'm Kelly McEvers and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. This weekend is America's 250th birthday. Needless to say, it is a complicated time. My guest today wanted to drive right into all that complexity, get in the middle of it, and see the places where it all started. So she took a road trip. Actually, a bunch of road trips. Beverly Gage as a Pulitzer Prize Award winner and a professor of history at Yale University. Her new book, This Land is Your Land, A Road Trip through US History, is a travelogue that takes us on a trip through American history in 13 places. Beverly visited museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, reenactments, and souvenir shops where Americans learn about and clash over our history. And some of the places might make sense. like Disneyland. So today we'll hear about a very amusing artifact in a Philly museum, how Beverly spent the night in a silo in New Mexico and why Disney World deserves to be recognized as a historic place and what all this has to do with our nation's successes and challenges. And Beverly Gage is with me now. Thank you. Great to be here. I want to start with how history became a part of your life. Is there a moment in your life when you knew that you would become a historian? That's a good question. There must be because somehow I ended up here. I grew up outside of Philadelphia, which is a very history-saturated city. That's a good question. There must be because somehow I ended up here. I grew up outside of Philadelphia, which is a very history-saturated city. liked going to those places, Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, all of those sites that are so famous in Philadelphia, but I wouldn't say as a young person that I wouldn't identify myself necessarily as on the fast track to being a historian. I discovered the world of history and American studies in college. And then I thought I wanted to be a journalist and kind of head out and explore the country and so I did that for a few years and then decided that actually that for a few years and then decided that actually that actually and then decided that actually that. I wanted to go a little bit more in depth in things than one can often go as a journalist. I was a little more comfortable with dead people than with living people and that I wanted to write books and so that's how I ended up back in history graduate school but I've always thought of myself as someone who's very much kind of at that intersection of the present and the past. and write a travel log. Well, I've always loved doing this kind of travel in the United States to historic sites, and I think it's one of the best ways to actually learn the country's history. Obviously, I'm a fan of sitting down with history books and doing original research, but I think you don't really engage as deeply or you engage differently if you can't be on the site, actually talking to people. and seeing what museums and historic sites have to do to kind of distill all of the details down to a narrative that's going to keep people coming and walking through their house museum or watching their reenactment. And so I've always been really fascinated by that distillation process and also just by the fun of being out on the road. And so both for the nation in 2026, but really for myself, I wanted to just kind of get out there. and explore in a different way. I love it. And it's why you're here with us now, because we are people who love to do that too. The book is titled This Land is Your Land. Of course, it's the title of the 1940s Folk Song by Woody Guthrie. When did that title come to you? This land is your land I came across because I thought it really captured two of the things that I want to do in the book. One is that it is a song that is both a celebration and a protest in one and that's very much the zone that I hoped the book would be in and it's also kind of an exhortation you know this land is your land go out and see it make something of it figure out what kind of country you want to be in and make it happen okay let's go through a few of the places if we could I would love to talk about all of them but let's pick a few Delco as you call it right because you grew up there. Yeah where did you want to start in Philadelphia what is that place there that you felt like was a great story to tell? Well one place that I was really curious about because I had never been there it only opened about a decade ago and I was long gone from Philadelphia by then is this place called the Museum of the American Revolution. You think really Philadelphia didn't have a museum of the American Revolution until a decade ago but fact they didn't. And so it's this big interesting state of the art museum. I think the thing that amused me most about that museum is that it makes a very big deal about having George Washington's field tent. And so a lot of the museum is built around getting to go into an auditorium, sit down, watch a movie and kind of a light show at the end of which they reveal this tent. And you get to see the tent and that's the big. So it is actually, you know, of a thrill in its own way and then it's also very funny because it is actually in the end just a tent and there's just a whole lot of historical energy invested in that but it's it's a great museum it's definitely worth going to and it really contends with all the big questions of the American Revolution what was revolutionary about it what were its limits who was in who was out how do we think about liberty and slavery together it's all right there a little bit. What