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

This Land Is Your Land is arranged to cover the major debates, conflicts, and transformations of the American past, beginning in 1776 and ending in the present. Think of it as a U.S. history survey course, only more fun and interesting, because it's happening out on the road. Each chapter describes a road trip unto itself, a five-to-ten-day journey by car through some significant place—a city, a state, a region—where the key questions of American history intensified at a certain moment, and where Americans today are wrestling with how to understand and interpret what happened. Twenty twenty-six marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a document that proclaimed the liberty and equality of all human beings but yielded a country whose citizens often failed to agree upon—or live up to—those ideals. This Land Is Your Land is an attempt to explore, if not reconcile, the greatest tensions of American history—to understand where we are as a nation by traveling through the past rather than looking away.

Because this is a book about the particular nation-state known as the United States of America at a particular historical juncture—the nation's semiquincentennial—the journey begins where the nation did: in Philadelphia in 1776. A different book might have started somewhere else, at some other moment in time. The possibilities are rich: the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois, the largest pre-Columbian historic site north of Mexico; Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the Pilgrims disembarked from the Mayflower in 1620; St. Augustine, Florida, founded by the Spanish fifty-five years before Plymouth; Jamestown in Virginia, where English settlers arrived in 1607 and the first Africans arrived twelve years later. The book could even have started outside the continental United States, in England or Spain or Ghana. Each of these beginnings would have revealed something different—that there were millions of people in North America before Europeans arrived, for instance, or that many people who crossed the Atlantic came in bondage rather than freedom. I often tell my students that the first challenge of writing history entails figuring out a beginning and an ending. Where you start and where you intend to finish shapes much of what happens in between.

The 1619 Project, one of the most successful and controversial historical salvos of recent years, understood this problem of national beginnings—of how starting in a certain place at a certain time shapes the direction of our gaze. Created by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project engaged in a thought experiment: What if we took 1619, the year the first Africans arrived at Jamestown, as the origin point for a retelling of American history? From that perspective, Hannah-Jones argued, we might better understand the persistence of slavery and racism as structuring forces in American society. In response, her critics doubled down on 1776 as the only possible date for an American founding. "The United States begins on a certain day, July 4, 1776, with a statement of the meaning of the nation and its purposes," declares the "1776 Curriculum" produced by Hillsdale College.

Like much of our current politics, the debate over the one true date of our national founding seems to reflect the country's high level of polarization. But on some level it is not polarization at all. Even as the MAGA movement has claimed 1776, its critics have often ceded the ground, giving up not only the date but the other great symbols of the founding era. What a mistake. As the political theorist Danielle Allen has noted, "no more important sentence has ever been written" on the subject of equality than the Declaration's assertion that "all men are created equal." For anyone who aspires to make good on that idea, despite all the flaws of the founding generation, the revolutionary moment of 1776 is still worth revisiting.

What's strange about our own moment is not that we can't agree on our history—that's always been the case—but that so many people seem to object to the idea that Americans have a common history at all. Hit the road, though, and you'll find that engagement with the country's past seems to be alive and well, even in some unlikely places. It's not a single or monochrome history, with everyone jammed into one tired old narrative. But it is a shared history, in which people of different religions, races, backgrounds, and aspirations have shaped what was possible for their neighbors and fellow citizens, even for people living halfway around the world. That history has been forged through generosity and oppression, through good will and bad, through acts of heroism and acts of betrayal, and through common engagement with a few persistent ideas. Among them is the fading notion that the United States ought to at least try to live up to the better angels of its nature.

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Despite my reputation for strong-arming family members into road trips, most of the journeys described here were undertaken as solo endeavors during 2023 and the first half of 2024, for the express purpose of writing this book. However much I might have enjoyed the attempt, I did not visit every historic site currently in operation. Instead, I set out to find some interesting places where the past once mattered and where it matters still. Many will be familiar: Independence Hall, the Alamo, Mount Rushmore. Others will be places and attractions you might never have heard of—the Eugene V. Debs House in Terre Haute, Indiana, or the historic black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi—especially if you weren't raised nearby. In all, I visited approximately three hundred historic sites, museums, battlefields, parks, monuments, and roadside attractions. Along the way, I slept in a nuclear missile silo and a 19th-century sex commune, attended Confederate Memorial Day, and, yes, went to Disneyland.