Before shooting up Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, Dylann Roof "spent months visiting local museums and plantations and churches, including Mother Emanuel," Beverly Gage writes in This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History. "When the police arrived, his car was strewn with travel brochures."
The author’s point seems to be that we are all trying to come to terms with our country’s complicated past—even murderous psychopaths. This is especially the case where race is involved. We’re all in this together, and on the road trips that Gage describes, taking us with her, she too is trying to understand our history. We would be remiss, she appears to suggest, to assume that we are not ourselves complicit, somehow, in acts such as Roof’s, unthinkable as they might seem when viewed from a comfortable distance and a position of privilege.
This is especially the case, apparently, for those of us who persist in revering people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who were, after all, slaveholders, and enjoy visiting such sites as Mount Vernon and Monticello. Gage enjoys touring these places, too. But when she does, she appears to take great pride in reminding us how imperfect our Founders were, which we can now recognize because we are, ourselves, so much more enlightened today than they were 250 years ago.
And not just Founders, but captains of industry, and just about everybody else we learn about in elementary school history books or see on place names, wherever we go. Not even Walt Disney, whose amusement parks and TV shows celebrated a tidied-up American past, gets a pass.
Gage takes us to the usual sites where such people are venerated, always holding back a bit from the reverence they are designed to inspire. Fortunately, there’s almost always, just down the road, a modest, storefront museum where the victims of famous Americans are remembered—those so much more deserving of our veneration.
This is by no means to suggest that Gage, a Yale professor and Pulitzer Prize winner for her biography of J. Edgar Hoover, is preachy about all this. She’s not. Her tone throughout is pleasant, good-natured, and conversational. She likes to remind us that she is "a historian," but also seems determined to show that she is not one of those forbiddingly bookish academics who reek of library stacks. She rides a bicycle and sometimes travels with her boyfriend. Children are almost always referred to as "kids."
At a visit to museum gift shops, she chats with the clerks. She asks tour guides slightly impertinent questions, but in a breezy, lighthearted, and self-deprecating way. When such guides appear a little uncomfortable with the spiels they are paid to make, she sympathizes. She might even be good company, if sometimes trying a little too hard to be cute.
Gage takes us to San Antonio, to see the Alamo where, in what became known as the Texas War of Independence, Davy Crockett and so many others were killed. Here, she reminds us, "a military rout [was transformed] into an inspiring myth." San Antonio plans a new visitors’ center, where, thank God, "they hope to do some updating and reinterpretation, with an eye to both accuracy and inclusion."
She goes next to San Jacinto where Sam Houston hollered, "Remember the Alamo!" and killed 600 Mexicans, captured Santa Anna, and ended the war. The carvings on the monument there, she tells us, "make no mention of racial slavery or indigenous land rights."
For all her good intentions, her treatment of Thomas Jefferson and Monticello does not inspire confidence in the assertions made in the rest of the book. Jefferson nowadays "is widely known not only as the author of the Declaration of Independence," Gage writes, "but as the father of at least six children born to Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who was the half sister of his deceased wife, Martha." Early on this claim was "derided, attacked and denied." Then came DNA tests of descendants and, when the results were in, "the grudging—then, finally, open—admission at Monticello that the Jefferson-Hemings story was true." As a result, Sally Hemings "may now be one of the most famous women in American history."
Where to begin? While it is true that Sally Hemings has attained a kind of celebrity, and while the leadership at Monticello has its own agenda, the DNA tests Gage cites as proving Jefferson was the father of "at least six children born to Sally Hemings" proved no such thing. What these tests did conclude was one of the descendants of one of Sally Hemings’s children, Eston Hemings, carried the same Y chromosome that Thomas Jefferson did. But so did nine other Jefferson males who lived near Monticello when Sally Hemings did.
One of these men was Thomas Jefferson’s brother Randolph, a widower when, in August 1807, Eston Hemings was conceived. As one of the Monticello slaves put it, this Randolph Jefferson "used to come out among the black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night."
None of this rules out the possibility that Thomas Jefferson might well have been the father of Sally Hemings’s children, but it in no way proves that he fathered even one of them, much less "at least" six.
For a book devoted to celebrating those left out of our conventional histories, it seems odd that nowhere in it are gays and trans people even mentioned. She could have gone to Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village, site of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, or to the Castro in San Francisco and paid homage to Harvey Milk, assassinated in 1978. But if she did, they are excluded from her narrative. There are those who claim silence is violence, which is a bit extreme, but it will be interesting to see how they regard this well-intentioned effort at "inclusion."
This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History
by Beverly Gage
Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $30
Alan Pell Crawford is the author, most recently, of This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America's Revolutionary War in the South (Knopf), winner of the American Battlefield Trust's 2025 award for history.