This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History

It's all gathered here in thirteen chapters, each one not only about a place but also a moment in time. The book is arranged chronologically rather than geographically, and thus zigzags around the country rather than moving seamlessly from coast to coast. It begins in revolutionary Philadelphia and ends in the mid-century California dream. In between, I bounce around. The chapters on the 19th century start in Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas, then hop up to central New York, down to South Carolina, out west to the Dakotas, and back east again to Gilded Age Chicago. The 20th-century chapters include visits to New South Atlanta and Deep South Alabama but also to New Deal Detroit and the Cold War Southwest. While I hit many history-saturated places, I skipped some others, including a few we tend to think of as especially "historic." There is no Boston, no New York City, no New Orleans, no Washington, D.C. Because this is a road trip, and therefore bounded by the viability of car travel, I restricted my explorations to the continental United States (no Alaska, no Hawaii).

For me, as for the country, there were some bumps along the way. While writing this book, I went through cancer treatment and (unrelatedly) broke my collarbone, in addition to managing a chronic immune system disorder that periodically causes my limbs to swell up for no good reason. My car broke down twice, there were two bouts of stomach flu, and one each of Covid and RSV. I sprained my ankle and I discovered, after a few climbs to hilltop monuments, that I am definitively middle-aged. Somehow that all seemed appropriate to the project, since the United States, as a nation, is not so young and spry itself anymore.

I did not go into my road trips in the style of the writer John Steinbeck, who set off to see America in a ginned-up RV with a poodle riding shotgun. Nor did I attempt in most cases to gain special access or secure behind-the-scenes tours. The road-trip genre tends to feature swaggering male protagonists, eager to show off their stamina or charisma or ability to do what others cannot. I tried to conduct my trips as any ordinary tourist would: rental cars, hotel rooms of varying quality, obedient strolls behind tour guides. My only special qualification was my background as a historian, which I hope allowed me to see and understand some things that others might miss. Aside from that, I was just another curious traveler, ready to get out of the house and see my country.

Some of what I found surprised me. I knew I wanted to write about the conflicts and tensions of U.S. history, beginning with the codification of freedom and slavery side by side. What I did not expect was how intensely local so much of that history would be. Each chapter of the book describes a small group of people who happened to live in a certain place at a certain time—and who, for that fleeting moment, came to stand in for the nation at large. Often they lived in places undergoing rapid economic change, whether along the Erie Canal in the 1830s or in the city of Detroit a century later. Some were beneficiaries of those changes, championing new ways of doing business and organizing society. Others were dissenters and resisters, determined to push back against the emerging order and promote alternative visions.

While this book is about those thirteen different places, it is also about the ways those places came to be connected to each other, whether they liked it or not. Each chapter begins with a historical traveler—someone who started out in one place and ended up in another, bringing along plenty of baggage in the form of ideas and experiences and culture. Today's red-blue political maps tend to depict the United States as a starkly divided country, each state one color or the other. But that's not how most people live their lives, stuck in one place, with only one set of ideas.

Not everyone had access to the freedom and resources that made movement possible. One thing that's striking about U.S. history, though, is just how often people from all walks of life picked up and moved somewhere else. This book puts them in conversation and in struggle with each other as they sort out what it means to be American. In the spirit of Woody Guthrie, This Land Is Your Land describes fights over the great symbols of national identity—the flag, the Declaration of Independence, the Liberty Bell, the Founding Fathers—and shows how each generation has adopted and rejected and remade those symbols anew. It describes how those battles have played out at historic sites, in the past as well as the present. For better or worse, public interest in history tends to peak at moments like ours, full of political debate, anxiety, and division.

Many of the sites I visited focus on the usual suspects of History-with-a-Capital-H: presidents and powerful men, along with the wars they like to start. Such places still dominate the historical landscape. They also pose interesting challenges of interpretation in an age when dead white men are no longer assumed to be the chief protagonists of history. You can't understand Thomas Jefferson without thinking about the people he enslaved, or Andrew Jackson without addressing what the Cherokee experienced on the Trail of Tears. That's not just because of what these men did in office but how they lived day to day, embedded in the contradictions that made the nation.

One achievement of recent decades has been to expand the usual cast of characters and experiences to ensure that all Americans, of all backgrounds, can be represented in monuments, sites, and museums. That project now seems to be in peril, for all the wrong reasons. To study everyone together is not to distort the past or to disparage otherwise venerable historical figures. It's to describe things as they really happened. Embracing new ways of thinking about history doesn't mean we need to expunge or ignore the stories and legends that have lingered from generation to generation, as part of an American historical vernacular. Those have ongoing value in our national conversation, across place and time. During the 19th century, any political movement worth its salt tried to claim the Declaration, the Revolution, and the Constitution as its rightful inheritance. As the country got more history under its belt, new touchstones emerged: Seneca Falls, Fort Sumter, Little Bighorn, Haymarket, the March on Washington..