Historian Beverly Gage hit the road to learn about our country's history. She visited more than 300 historic sites — from museums and battlefields to roadside attractions. What she learned about how America honors its history.

Beverly Gage, history professor at Yale University. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” Her latest book is “This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History."

Matt Anderson, curator of transportation at The Henry Ford.

Hermon Johnson Jr., director of the Mound Bayou Museum.

Excerpted from This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History. Copyright © 2026 by Beverly Gage. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I        

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: When we think of the idea of America, those ideas are often the ones presented to us via the nation's historians. Beverly Gage is one of them. She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale history professor and author of many books, including G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.

Recently, Gage decided to do something interesting. She's flipping the script, so to speak. She decided to absorb American history in the way that most of us actually experience it rather than simply receive it. To celebrate America's 250th, Beverly Gage went on a road trip, and the result is her new book, This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History.

And she joins us now. Professor Beverly Gage, welcome back to On Point.

BEVERLY GAGE: Thanks, Meghna. It's great to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So tell me the genesis of this idea to road trip it across America.

GAGE: I have always loved doing this sort of travel, and if you ask my son, who is now grown up, he would say, "She dragged me on so many of these throughout my childhood," although I think he secretly loved it, and maybe would even admit that now. And I was looking ahead to 2026, and I wanted to figure out a way to engage what even back when I was thinking about in 2022, '23, '24, looked like it was going to be a complicated moment for Americans.

And so I decided to put those two things together and make this book.

CHAKRABARTI: It sounds like such a wonderful idea, and I'm glad you just said that it took a couple of years because you went to, what, more than 300 places?

GAGE: Yeah. So there are 13 places featured in the chapters of the book, but that's often a region or an entire city, and so within that I went to many places.

And of course there are lots of places that I went to that I didn't end up writing about by the very nature of this kind of project. So I did it over the course of about a year and a half in little chunks. It wasn't one grand, stupendous road trip, seamless in that way.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. But the thing, the beautiful thing about American history is that it's so dynamic, oftentimes very idiosyncratic, right?

And I'm just wondering what was the process that you went through to decide what ended up in the book, since you did visit so many places?

GAGE: I knew when I started out that I wanted the book to cover all 250 years of American history, or as close as I could get to that. I think there's a little risk in moments like the semiquincentennial this year.

That we all spend our time thinking about the founding, and that's great, that's important, but there's a lot of other American history, too, and frankly, I'm really a 20th century specialist, and so I knew I wasn't going to write a book or wasn't going to write a good book about the American Revolution.

So I knew it wanted to have this big scope, and so then the question was where to go. And it really emerged organically into these 13 set pieces, each one of which is both a place and a period of time. So it starts in Philadelphia with the American Revolution. It ends in southern California in the late 20th century.

And then in between, I found places all over the country that for some moment in time really seemed to capture people's imagination, seemed to stand in for the nation at-large, and so those are the places that I went.

It starts in Philadelphia with the American Revolution. It ends in Southern California in the late 20th century. And then in between, I found places ... that for some moment in time really seemed to capture people's imagination.

Beverly Gage

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. You know what's of course so beautiful about this idea that you had is that the road trip is quintessentially American, right?

I just, I don't know of a single person, there's probably somebody out there, who hasn't taken some kind of road trip in this country. And one of the reasons why, of course, is that the car, the automobile, is so central to at least modern American history. So what we want to do is we want to start by listening to a little bit from one of the places that you stopped because, of course, as I just said, the road trip is made possible only with a car.

MATT ANDERSON: The car, in a sense, democratized travel in the 20th century. It made it possible for folks to get out and see the country firsthand, to experience it, not just read about those sights out there, but go see them with their own eyes.

The car, in a sense, democratized travel in the 20th century. It made it possible for folks to get out and see the country firsthand.

Matt Anderson

CHAKRABARTI: So this is Matt Anderson. He's curator of transportation at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

ANDERSON: There would be no Disneyland without the automobile, without the interstate highway system. For that matter, there would be no Colonial Williamsburg, no The Henry Ford, where I'm sitting now, without automotive travel making it possible for folks to come see these destinations.

CHAKRABARTI: So Professor Gage, as you talk about in the book when you were plotting your all-American road trip, you knew you had to stop at the Ford River Rouge complex, the birthplace of the American automobile.

So here's Matt Anderson again with that story.

ANDERSON: So the automobile comes on the scene in the 1890s, right around the turn of the 20th century. And initially, cars are just very expensive playthings for the wealthy, right? No one can afford to buy one unless you're rich. There's arguably no practical reason to own one.

We have streetcars, and most people live within walkable communities and so forth. So a lot of folks thought, there was no future in these things. But there were folks who realized, there might be something to these cars because of the freedom and independence that they gave people.

It took a few years for Ford to develop the perfect automobile for his ambitions, but that became the Model T, which was introduced in the fall of 1908.

It sold very well out of the gate because it was well-built and because it was a bit of a reach, but still within the means of middle-class Americans.

Not what I would ever call a particularly attractive or beautiful car, but beautiful in its design. This is a car where certainly the form follows the function. It's designed for a purpose, and served that purpose very well. There were about 15 million Model Ts built over the 19 years it was produced from 1908 right on up through 1927 when the last one came off the line.

[FORD AD]: Under the old stationary system, the record time for assembling a car had been 12 hours and 13 minutes. Using the assembly line process, it took one hour and 33 minutes.

ANDERSON: Ford Rouge plant hit its heyday late '20s, early 1930s. At its peak just the numbers of the size of the facility, it's about one and a half miles wide by a mile long, 93 different buildings, about 16 million square feet of factory floor space, 100 miles of railroad track just within the plant complex itself to shuttle materials between buildings, and 100,000 employees at its peak working there, building about 4,000 cars each day.

Not an overstatement to say at that point that one half of all the cars on the road in the United States were Ford Model Ts. So it really is the car that hit that sweet spot and turned the automobile from a plaything for the wealthy into a tool of everyday life. Anything you can name is impacted by the automobile.

Where we live, how we play, what we eat, where we eat, all of that has changed, and changed very quickly. By the 1920s, folks, no longer talking about owning cars. They're talking about owning second cars. You read stories during the Great Depression of folks who are willing to give up clothing, they're willing to give up food, they're willing to give up almost anything, but they won't let go of the car.

Anything you can name is impacted by the automobile. Where we live, how we play, what we eat, where we eat, all of that has changed.

Matt Anderson

So it had established itself certainly by the 1930s, arguably even by the mid-1920s, as an essential tool of American life. And with that came this whole reordering of our lifestyles. People begin moving out into suburbs, driving into work. We start building improved highways. There's just no going back, for better or for worse.

CHAKRABARTI: Matt Anderson is curator of transportation at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Beverly Gage, what was it like visiting the River Rouge complex?

GAGE: It was an amazing experience even now 100 years after it was built. When Henry Ford built that complex, it was the largest industrial facility in the world and was a tourist attraction for that reason.

People came from around the world to see it. And when you go today, it's in somewhat diminished form. You come in on a tour bus, and you really are only seeing one building and a very sort of boosterish story of the Ford Motor Company. But it is still an amazing thing to see because so much of our industrial history really has been lost in these recent decades, and this is one place where it's really preserved.

And it's just vast. I had just never been in a historical site, I guess we could call it, like that. As you heard, it's a mile, more than a mile long. There are so many different buildings, and it's really this testament to that moment in American history that was both about this kind of large-scale industrial production, about a certain kind of optimism on that front, and of course, about the automobile itself.

CHAKRABARTI: As Matt said the automobile really transformed American life, American infrastructure, culture, everything. But also, in the rise of the industrial age, and particularly with Ford and his new method of manufacturing, there's a social history there as well.

GAGE: That's right. One of the reasons I wanted to go to Dearborn in particular is not only to see that facility, but to really look at the birth of the American labor movement as we know it today, which happened simultaneously with this rise of mass industry in the 1920s and 1930s.

There again, are not that many places you can go that are really engaging with that kind of deep labor history. But this is one of them, and the United Auto Workers is born in great struggle with Ford, with GM, with other employers during this period. And you can find pieces of that history all over Dearborn, but all over the Detroit area in general.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, given again the sort of tumultuous truths of American history, does the Ford River Rouge complex today also deal with things like Henry Ford's rampant antisemitism?

GAGE: That is not a prominent feature of the way that The Henry Ford, which is this museum complex as well as the River Rouge tour, it's not a big part of how they self-present.

It was, in fact, a big part of Henry Ford's reputation, especially in the 1920s. He was one of America's most famous and virulent anti-Semites. And so there are all sorts of aspects of the history that you can find there, some of which Henry Ford wanted to put on display. He built a whole living history village.

He built a whole museum, and some of which were part of his making history that, you know, his fans and supporters might not be so fond of these days.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And we have to take a quick break here, but when we come back I'm going to follow up with you on that. Because one of the things that history is about is not just the stories that we want to tell to others about our collective story, but it's what we try to tell ourselves, right?

What we want to believe about ourselves.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: And Professor Gage, just to pick up where we left off, you write about how one of the beautiful draws of these local historic sites all across the country is that it's a place where people are trying to really figure out how to tell the stories of their communities.

What happened in those communities? And also, you say they're trying to sell those stories as well to the rest of America. They're trying to be heard. And I think that's exactly right, which is why when some of these sites, the people there are actually trying to really forcefully grapple with the complexity of the history that took place there, that's one thing.

But then in other sites, go back to the Ford plant, where maybe there are curious elisions of that history. What does that tell you about what we still want to believe about ourselves, Professor Gage?

GAGE: That was part of the fun of going on the road trip, was asking exactly that kind of question.

And there were multiple levels on which one can engage with historic sites. So one is just as a student, right? Someone who's curious going there to learn the history. And then there's the next level, which is, what is the narrative that's being told here? Is it heroic? Is it damning? How do you link up local history to national history?

And the sites that I went to all did it really differently. There's one comparison between government-run sites and private sites, so that's often a big distinction. And then there are these kind of famous, highly professional places that one can go, Independence Hall, the Alamo and then there are incredibly small local operations that are just experimenting.

I'd say they're all engaged in this big project, as you describe it, of trying to put these pieces together, but it shouldn't be any surprise in a country as big and diverse as ours that those pieces get put together quite differently depending on where you are.

CHAKRABARTI: But tell me more. I want to push on this if I could, Beverly, because, you're a professional and highly respected historian.

Do you think that in order for us to be both truly honest and proud of our history, that we have to do a better job at encapsulating the parts in these very sites that may not be as flattering as we want them to be?

GAGE: Absolutely. One premise of this book was that you can know American history in all of its complexity, in all of its injustices, and still say that you love your country.

You can know American history in all of its complexity, in all of its injustices, and still say that you love your country.

Beverly Gage

Those are things that often don't go together very well in our public discourse at the moment, and I think we've really gotten ourselves locked into a situation in which you hear lots of claims that if you are an American patriot, you can only say good things. This is basically becoming federal policy right now.

And then on the other hand, I think there are lots of people who say, Ugh, this country has such a track record of injustice, of cruelty, of violence, that I want nothing to do with it. I don't have a way to engage 2026.

And so for me, it really was an attempt to find a way to put some of those pieces together, and I thought that the road trip was a good method for that, not only because it has this long American history that even goes back before the automobile. But also, because these sites are places that unlike the way we encounter each other on screens and such, they have to take all comers.

These are not driven by algorithms. They are driven by human curiosity and human conversation, and they have to figure out a way to talk to people.

CHAKRABARTI: And the people who work in these sites and devote their lives to them are the most remarkable Americans, I think. Honestly, first of all, like they know everything.

I just always appreciate running into people who are these vast stores of a tiny little niche of knowledge about this country. And their enthusiasm, I find whenever I visit places like this, is unparalleled. Like I remember a couple of years ago, I was up in Alaska, and I went to this tiny local museum about the Yukon gold rush, and it was actually incredible.

I ended up spending like three hours there. One of the reasons why is because the person working at the front desk who was just kind of letting people in turned out to be the most amazing storyteller about the trials and tribulations of trying to find gold up in Alaska. So I'm wondering, can you tell us about some of the people you met?

GAGE: I had so many kind of deeply nerdy conversations over the course of this road trip, as you can imagine, both with guides, and depending on where you are, those are sometimes highly trained professional guides with many degrees. In other places, they're just volunteers who have shown up.

But I think it's really true that if you start asking questions and you scratch that surface, and often in that kind of environment you're getting the kind of first draft the surface story when you do the official tour. This can go on, as you say, for hours and hours and hours. And so I had those experiences really all over the country.

CHAKRABARTI: And I should say you did not go as Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale professor Beverly Gage, who had special sort of insider access, right? You just went in just like the rest of us and said, "Hey, I drove up here and I want to just check out your site."

Is that right?

GAGE: That's right. The idea was to do a road trip that anyone can do. So it wasn't about getting the behind-the-scenes access. It wasn't about getting the special interview, although if I was in conversation with someone and they said, why are you taking pictures of everything, and why are you taking so many notes?

Do you need stuff about every plaque in our museum? I would, of course, explain who I was and what I was doing.

CHAKRABARTI: And then they should be like, Oh, now let me give you the insider's tour. Okay, so let's talk about some more of the places that you visited. You went to a sex commune, Beverly Gage?

GAGE: A 19th century sex commune.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)

GAGE: That has since been turned into an extremely respectable place. But yeah, I went to this place called Oneida, which is in upstate New York, and in the 19th century, Oneida was this very famous place as a kind of perfectionist religious commune that had a variety of very strange sexual practices at its heart.

The Oneida members believed that you could create the perfect and most enlightened human through what they called scientific breeding, and so there were all sorts of rules and regulations about who could have sex with whom. As in many of these situations, that often meant that the guy at the top got to have sex with pretty much everyone, whoever he wanted to.

But it was a place that had all sorts of kind of political perfectionist ideas, and also created a silverware company, which many people still know about. So it lasted a long time, because it had this very successful business.

CHAKRABARTI: Wait. The silverware company came out of the same --

GAGE: Oh, yeah. If you've ever used Oneida silverware.

CHAKRABARTI: I am not going to look at my silverware in the same way again. Wow. Okay. So continue, please

GAGE: Yeah, the company survived. The commune collapsed in the late 19th century, and the company survived for a lot longer than that.

What's there now is a big community center. They built this sprawling building, and it is still there and you can go visit. Part of it is a community center, part of it's apartments, but they have some hotel rooms that they rent out, and if you go and stay in the hotel rooms, you can also take a tour of not only the grounds, but of their history.

They have a whole museum devoted to the Oneida commune in its heyday.

CHAKRABARTI: One more quick thing about Oneida, because you said it's 19th century they had some very strange, thoughts or beliefs that they thought were scientifically driven. So this, to me, is sounding like a local manifestation of the various ways in which the eugenics movement was alive in America at that time.

GAGE: Yeah, the Oneida commune is really before eugenics formally.

CHAKRABARTI: Before that. Okay.

GAGE: And a lot of their ideas were really about religious perfectionism and purification of that sort. Of course, because this is the 19th century and because this is America, race is always a part of that story, but it wasn't really the central feature at Oneida.

CHAKRABARTI: What was it like sleeping in that hotel?

GAGE: It was funny. You can't help thinking about who's been there over a very long period of time. It's also true that the lock on my door didn't work, which I found to be interesting, I didn't feel nervous about that, but I thought it was pretty funny given where I was.

CHAKRABARTI: That's a curious thing to do. Okay. Let's move to a completely different part of U.S. history, and this has to do with a place that should be better known, but right now I think it's not well enough known. But it's key to African American history. It's not Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

It's not Harlem in New York. Those are places that most of us have at least heard of. This place is in the South, and it's called Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

HERMON JOHNSON JR.: In our history books here in Mississippi, when I was taking history 100 years ago, there were just two lines about Mound Bayou. They didn't talk about it.

And matter of fact, I just saw last year the travel guide for the State of Mississippi, and they did not even list Mound Bayou.

CHAKRABARTI: This is Hermon Johnson Jr. His family has called Mound Bayou home for at least four generations, and he still lives there and runs the Mound Bayou Museum. Now, Mound Bayou was founded in 1887 by Isaiah T.

Montgomery and his cousin, Benjamin T. Green. They had both been formerly enslaved.

It was an independent, self-governing, all-Black city, the first of its kind in the nation.

JOHNSON JR.: Here's what my father says. He says he got here in the '50s. He said, "Mound Bayou was jumping." And I'm just saying it the way he says it.

We had just about everything that we would need, we needed, self-contained. We had our own movie theater. Of course, we were self-contained as far as political government and that type of thing. We had all the stores that we needed here. And so everything that you would need to go to a white town for, you really didn't need to do that.

Everything was already here.

So think of it this way. If you are being treated horribly in Mississippi, so if you live in 30, 40, 50 miles from Mound Bayou, you might want to come to Mound Bayou to shop instead of the places that are near you. Because they're going to make you go to the back, they're going to treat you like dirt. So the store owners here in Mound Bayou become some of the wealthiest people in the state of Mississippi.

If you are being treated horribly in Mississippi ... you might want to come to Mound Bayou to shop, instead of the places that are near you. Because they're going to make you go to the back, they're going to treat you like dirt.

Hermon Johnson Jr.

Also, a lot of people were sending people to Mound Bayou, sending their kids to Mound Bayou for education. And so when they were only going up to maybe the third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade in the state of Mississippi teaching Black people or bringing Black people to school, the only way a lot of people were furthering their education, their choice was Mound Bayou.

Mound Bayou was a sanctuary city, so if you made it to Mound Bayou, you were safe. The people, I call them the yahoos or Ku Klux Klan, they get jealous and they wanted to come burn Mound Bayou down. The ... good white people decided that they weren't going to let that happen. And so they let the people in Mound Bayou know that they're coming to burn you down.

Mound Bayou was a sanctuary city, so if you made it to Mound Bayou, you were safe.

Hermon Johnson Jr.

So the people of Mound Bayou organized. They had guys up on the rooftops and in the windows with rifles waiting on them. And then they had a guy that sat on top of the bank building and he was up there with a Gatling gun. And when these guys, when they rode into town, the guy on the rooftop let that Gatling gun be heard.

He just cranked it up and let it be heard. When they heard the Gatling gun, they knew that distinctive sound. They turned around and they fled.

When we first opened our museum, there was collection from a man who had been collecting artifacts all his life, and he had this huge collection of African American memorabilia.

A lot of it, a good percentage of it was negative, stereotypical. And the way we characterized it is that when we brought people in, we would say, "You look at this negativity, and this negativity represents the lie that America tells about who Black people are to justify slavery, to justify Jim Crow, and to justify their cruelness toward African Americans.

But the truth about who Black people are can be accurately told through the story of Mound Bayou.

The truth about who Black people are can be accurately told through the story of Mound Bayou.

Hermon Johnson Jr.

CHAKRABARTI: Hermon Johnson Jr. is director of the Mound Bayou Museum in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Beverly Gage, what drew you there?

GAGE: I didn't initially plan to go to Mound Bayou. I went to the Mississippi Delta as part of a chapter on civil rights history and civil rights tourism, which is really expanding in a lot of parts of the South.

I was really focused on Alabama and Mississippi. And so I was in the Delta to see some of the new sites devoted to the Emmett Till lynching from the 1950s that had been developing over the years. But as I was having breakfast in Cleveland, Mississippi one morning, I saw mention of Mound Bayou and the fact that Mound Bayou had opened this new museum.

And I was so excited because I actually knew some of this history of Mound Bayou. I didn't know that anything was being done with that history. So I immediately redid my itinerary and set off for Mound Bayou. Now, this museum was not all that easy to find. It hadn't made it into the world of GPS yet.

But it's a little town, and so I just stopped and started asking around. Some guys were like, "Yeah we have a museum. The museum's closed. Oh, wait, but if you go knock on the window of that car across the street, that's one of the men who founded it." So I went and knocked. It was actually Hermon's brother.

... And he very kindly called up Hermon, and I spent the morning in the museum really learning with and engaging with all of this history.

CHAKRABARTI: Isn't that remarkable? We heard Hermon earlier say that even though Mound Bayou was the first independent self-governing all Black city in the country, it wasn't even in the Mississippi tourism guide.

And you say it wasn't even in GPS, hadn't quite located it yet either. But I understand that Hermon's trying to change that.

GAGE: That's right. One of the things that's really remarkable about Mound Bayou is I guess I'll say two things. One is that it became, really, a center of civil rights activism in the '40s, '50s, and '60s in ways that I think haven't been fully incorporated into either our public history or our textbooks.

Because it was such a sanctuary place, it became a place where you could learn about voting rights and civil rights. So Medgar Evers, for instance, worked in Mound Bayou for a long time before he emerged as a civil rights leader. It was a place where people could come and be protected. So Mamie Till, when she came down to find out what had happened to her son, spent a lot of time in Mound Bayou.

So it's got this amazing civil rights history in addition to its broader history. And partly as a result of the civil rights movement, when desegregation started to happen, the population of Mound Bayou started to empty out a little bit, and there are lots of downsides to that. But one upside is that a lot of the historic structures are still there.

They're often unused at this moment or in some state of collapse, needing some repair, but the potential is all there to really turn this into a historic town that would have huge significance and really would tell us a different set of stories about the United States than we often hear.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Beverly, we'll get to your night with the nukes in just a second here, but I wanted to ask you some fundamental questions about the nature of your road trip, the things that everybody wants to know.

What were your favorite snacks?

GAGE: That's very good. I tried to be relatively restrained about this, and so I veered toward protein. And I also would say that even more than snacks, the essential for me really was audiobooks. Because I had this kind of immersive strategy where as I was driving around, particularly in places where the distances were vast, I would put on an audiobook that was about that region at the moment that I was trying to invest in historically.

And so I tried to do the full immersion thing.

CHAKRABARTI: You were very restrained because when it comes to snacks and road trips, the time where I fully allow myself to let loose from any pretense of eating healthy is when I'm in the car. I just feel like that's also a fundamental part of the American road trip.

You gotta pull off to the side of the road at whatever's there, your roadside diner, and just eat whatever you have. But so I appreciate your maintaining healthiness there.

GAGE: When you're doing as much of it as I was doing, it would go south really fast if it was all junk food.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And you did most of this on your own but a little bit with your son as well, right?

GAGE: That's right. Most of these were trips that I undertook as part of the research for this book, and so I was going alone on my own schedule and, you know, spending lots more time actually in a lot of these places than many ordinary people might want to.

But I did bring my son along on some of the trips, and my husband was also with me very occasionally.

CHAKRABARTI: Did you play any games in the car when you had family members with you?

GAGE: My son Nick and I, partly because we've done so many road trips through vast relatively unpopulated spaces over the years, we play the cow game.

That is a highly competitive, he gets to look out one side of the car, I get to look out the other side, and we see who gets to spot more cows.

CHAKRABARTI: Who won?

GAGE: Nick won.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, how many did he spot?

GAGE: I don't remember the exact number, but we were in Texas, so it was quite a lot.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, but my amazing producer, Paige, knows the exact number.

I think it's over ... here it is. It is in the book. It is here. It is in the book. She has it here. Okay. Your son counted 677 cows in Texas on one leg. The cows had more than one leg, but it was one leg of your trip. And you came in with a measly 625, Beverly. Come on.

GAGE: I know. It was brutal.

CHAKRABARTI: By the way, I'm so pleased that you guys did play games because I think that's one of the things about the pre-digital age car road trip, which was so magical and people have so many memories of, is actually, people interacted.

You're trapped in a little car. You have to do something. And so every family has their own set of unique car-based games that they play with each other on road trips. And part of me is a little sad that because of digital technology, maybe that's going the way of the dodo. But one more thing about traveling, and especially the times where you were on your own, Beverly.

On your own as a woman how did that feel?

GAGE: I was very conscious when I was doing this traveling but writing this book that the road trip is just a very masculine genre. And so our most famous road trip books tend to be about a swaggering man on the edge of society exploring or declaiming about America.

And I knew that I wasn't going to write that kind of book. I would say this is like a mom book. Mom on a road trip. And at the same time, I was very self-conscious in moments about being a woman traveling alone, not so much because I felt any sort of danger, but because I found that I was a little hard for my fellow travelers to process.

Who is this middle-aged woman by herself obsessively going to historic sites? Sometimes people asked, sometimes they didn't and just gave me strange looks. But of course, most people do this kind of travel with their friends, with their family, with their partners. And so I was often I won't say the odd man out, I'll say the odd woman out in those settings.

I found that I was a little hard for my fellow travelers to process. Who is this middle-aged woman by herself obsessively going to historic sites?

CHAKRABARTI: I have to say, nothing gives me more pleasure in this moment right now than to say, "Move over, Jack Kerouac. Here comes Beverly Gage," okay?

GAGE: (LAUGHS) The mom book, yes.

CHAKRABARTI: On the Road with Mom. Okay. So let's talk about this nuclear missile silo that you not only visited but slept in.

GAGE: I went to the Southwest, especially New Mexico and Nevada, a little bit of Eastern California to look at the history of the Second World War and the early Cold War, and think about the ways that not only reshaped the world, but had these dramatic impacts in the domestic United States.

And the Southwest is one of the key areas where you can really see that in the landscape, in the historic sites that are there. So I went to Los Alamos to think about the origins of nuclear war. But then to capture a later period of that story, I went down outside of Roswell, New Mexico, where a local entrepreneur and history buff has rehabbed a former Atlas missile silo and turned it into an Airbnb.

So you can go stay in a nuclear missile silo, it's way out there pretty far outside of Roswell, and spend the night underground in this very strange but illuminating place.

CHAKRABARTI: Strange because also, when it was an active nuclear missile silo, there were people who were working there who were also staying there.

Did you try to put yourself in the minds of those people?

GAGE: I did. These were Atlas missile silos that were put in the early 1960s, so just as an intercontinental ballistic missiles were becoming a thing, the idea that you could basically just press a button and turn a key and a missile would fly halfway around the world with great destructive capacity.

And so I spent a lot of time when I was there, in what is actually a pretty nice underground apartment at this point, but thinking about the men whose job it was to go underground when the missile was there to spend day after day enacting these routines, conducting maintenance, waiting for the call that they hoped would never come, but whose whole purpose when they were down there was to be ready to wreak this kind of immense destruction on people halfway around the world.

So I thought a lot about what that experience might have been like.

CHAKRABARTI: So let's take a step back for a moment, Beverly, because we talked about, I guess we talked about three, four really different kinds of historical sites in this country. But I get the impression from your book that even though they're all telling different slices of American history, that you actually found a lot of commonality between them?

GAGE: That's right. I guess I had an instinct that might be the case, but I didn't know how I would see it emerge. And what I found were that there were all sorts of connections between these places in how they interacted with each other, how they imagined each other. Sometimes I found characters who would show up again and again over the course of my travels.

One of those was someone who I did not expect to spend a lot of time thinking about. David Crockett, better known as Davy Crockett. And I first encountered him when I was visiting Tennessee to think about the 1820s and 1830s, and Andrew Jackson, and the process of Indian removal. I learned there something that I hadn't known about him, which is that he was the only member of the Tennessee congressional delegation to vote against Indian removal.

And so it really gave a different complexity to him as a figure, to that whole moment to think about the opposition to that really pernicious federal policy. But that kind of destroyed his political career in Tennessee, or helped to. So he took off for Texas, and I was going to Texas and there I was at the Alamo where Davy Crockett met his death.

And so I thought, Wow, okay, we've got all this traveling from one place to another, taking experiences and stories and history and connecting these places. And then when I was writing about Disneyland, one of the last chapters of the book, there was Davy Crockett again, as this kind of Wild West legend being remade, a century after his death for the consumption of little American boys.

CHAKRABARTI: King of the Wild Frontier. I can almost still hear the song in my head. So the reason why I ask that is because you have this quote from President Johnson that you saw, what, engraved on the wall at the LBJ Presidential Library, right? And this is obviously in Texas. And the quote is that American history is about, quote, "The excitement of becoming, always becoming, trying, probing, failing, resting, and trying again."

Is that what you saw in these sites?

GAGE: It is what I saw, and I really came to think of American history as in part this conversation over time between generations about what this country is, what it's supposed to be, how it relates to its founding legacies, how it relates to its highest ideals, how it grapples with the tensions between ideals and realities.

And the other thing that I saw again and again, which I think really speaks to our moment, is an ambivalence and uncertainty in the people of the past about how they felt about the country and how they wanted to engage it. One of the places that the book starts is Independence Hall, and there you have George Washington's chair where he sat when the Constitutional Convention was happening.

On the back of that chair there's a half sun, and Benjamin Franklin is said to have sat in that room looking at that half sun, wondering if that sun was rising or setting on this thing called the United States of America. So those anxieties have been there from the first moment, and I encountered so many historical characters during my travels who were really at the intersection of wanting to love the country, wanting to make it a better place, being horrified by some of the things that it was doing, trying to use their own talents to bring about transformative change, sometimes accomplishing that, sometimes being disappointed.

But it's a messy history, and I think we, in our own moment, are just in that messy history once again. And so I think there are lots of models for how to think about it that you can find out there traveling through history.

CHAKRABARTI: Do you ever wonder how our current history might be told by future generations? Because I'm thinking about, you had said earlier that we're in a moment right now where at least amongst our national leaders, the president, it's in vogue to erase parts of history that he doesn't like. So I'm just thinking of January 6, 2021, he's trying to erase the public record of that by pardoning all the people who stormed the Capitol, et cetera.

But given how you have seen current Americans remembering their local pasts, does it give you hope that we'll be honest with ourselves a couple generations from now when we look back at, say, 2026?

GAGE: There's no question that this is a troubling moment for the practice of history, and there are lots of pressures from whether records are going to be made available federal policies that say you can only say this and you can't say that.

Those are all really troubling. But history is a big tent enterprise, and it's actually not that easy to control what people know about their history, especially once the cat's out of the bag, right? Especially once we have all these places where this history is being engaged, and is being preserved, and is being thought through.

So I am an optimist that there's going to be both a powerful historical record of this moment, but also that even attempts to suppress history are going to get lots and lots of pushback because part of the premise of this book is that anyone can get out there and really try to explore this and learn and engage with the history that they wanna know and that really matters.

CHAKRABARTI: What's your answer to Franklin's question about whether the sun is rising or setting on the United States?

GAGE: I think there's a choice involved in answering that question. And so I'm going to say rising, because I think that optimism is a choice. And I'm concerned that in this moment, though there are plenty of signals that the United States is in some distress, in some trouble, maybe even in a certain kind of decline. Nonetheless, I think that simply going with that is a way of disengaging.

It's a way of not being curious. It's a way of not taking your duties seriously as a citizen and as a participant in this society. And I say rising because I think that optimism is a choice that has to be made in this moment. We have to envision bigger and better futures. And people of the past did that, and brought us the world that we have today, for better and for worse.

We have to envision bigger and better futures. And people of the past did that, and brought us the world that we have today, for better and for worse.

Beverly Gage

CHAKRABARTI: So you went on these road trips in part looking for hope as well. It sounds like you found it, Beverly.

GAGE: It's so much better being out talking to actual human beings. Being actually on the ground in living, functioning communities as diverse and different as they all are.

Yeah, it was heartening. It's a much better way I think to try to understand where we are, or at least it's a very powerful supplement other than our algorithm-driven, screen-based interactions.

CHAKRABARTI: You know what I find most heartening about these local historical places is that when you go there, the current pressures of national politics get stripped away.

And what you're actually interacting with are real people at a local level who are capturing a history of local people just trying to live their lives during the various times that they are they're examining. It is so refreshing to be back at that level of reality that, as you said, sometimes because of the news and algorithms, et cetera, we're really disconnected from.

Okay, Beverly, we have 30 seconds. What's one place I should add on my list of places to road trip to?

GAGE: Disneyland.

CHAKRABARTI: No! I've already been there. Give me another one. Quick.

GAGE: Okay. Then the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, which is not too far off from Disneyland, but was as far as I got into the late 20th century, will tell you a lot about how our world was made.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.