by Beverly Gage

Summary

Benjamin Franklin once wondered whether the sun carved into the chair he sat in at the Constitutional Convention was rising or setting on the young republic. This Land Is Your Land takes that question on the road, traveling to thirteen places across the country where Americans go to learn, argue, and sometimes reenact their own history: Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Civil War battlefields, roadside museums, even Disneyland.

Each stop becomes its own chapter, mixing memoir, travel writing, and historical reporting, and each one complicates the last. Sites built to celebrate American achievement sit alongside sites that mark American failure, often within the same afternoon's drive. Arriving as the country marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, the book argues that confronting the harder parts of that history and loving the country it produced are not opposing impulses, but the same one.