A Road Trip through US History

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**Carol Massar** (0:08)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Carol Massar** (0:15)
Well, as the US gets ready to celebrate its 250th birthday as an independent nation, there are many questions about the future of its democracy and also about freedom of speech and a lot more. I think it's safe to say something that has been given, kind of a given. I think freedom of speech and democracy when it comes to the nation's history. Our roundtable to talk about this and more, Janet Lorin, Bloomberg News, Higher Education Finance Reporter. She's here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. Also with us is Beverly Gage, author of a new book just out today. It is entitled This Land is Your Land, A Road Trip Through US. History. It's a travelogue of the United States giving relevant bits of history in areas including Chicago, Atlanta, upstate New York. Again, ahead of the 250th anniversary of our nation. She is a history professor at Yale and she won a Pulitzer for her biography of J. Edgar Hoover. She joins us, Professor Gage from Cheshire, Connecticut.
Good to have you both with us. I want to start with you, Professor Gage. You have this new book out. I would love to travel across America and see all our history points. I always love a group in an area that was very much has a lot of colonial old time houses here just outside New York City.
As you traveled around the country, what struck you?

**Beverly Gage** (1:38)
Well, the book is designed to actually help people do exactly what you're saying. Travel the country and learn about their history. So there are 13 chapters. Each one is both a place and a moment and time. If you did them all, you would cover these 250 years of US history. I guess what really struck me was both the vast expanse and the amount of kind of contestation that has been there all throughout American history, and then some of the links between these places that I didn't expect to find better there once you hit the road.
What would you like to highlight? What was your favorite stop along the way?
Well, the book begins in Philadelphia, which is where I'm from in the era of the American Revolution, and it ends in California in the late 20th century. So the Reagan Library and Disneyland and all of the forces that shaped politics in that moment. Then in between, I jumped around a lot. I guess the places that I was most interested in were the ones that I had never been to before, and in fact, the ones that I really hadn't heard of before I set out on these trips, places like Medora, North Dakota, which is all about the history of Theodore Roosevelt or Dearborn, Michigan, which I had heard of but had never been to, where there's a lot of stuff about the history of American industry, of Henry Ford, of the labor movement, all in one small place.

**Janet Lorin** (3:12)
Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us, and I really enjoyed it. Hearing also about the travails of traveling along, we forget about COVID when you were writing and your son was in the hotel, and we could really relate to that.
Tell me a little bit about your trip to Chicago and why you picked that period. That's my hometown, but I had recently started to read The Devil and the White City, and we were exactly in that point of time.

**Beverly Gage** (3:38)
Yeah. Chicago is my city on the Gilded Age, which is the period in the late 19th century that saw the rise of mass American industry. When Chicago itself as a city really came into its own as a rail hub, a stockyard center, production center, all of the things that made Chicago so important in its time. One of the things that's great about visiting Chicago today is that you can not only see the way the city was built in that era and still go visit a lot of the things that were built in that moment. But it's also one of the places that still deals in, I think, a really thoughtful and interesting way with some of the clashes that happened during the Gilded Age over economic inequality, and work conditions, and concentrated fortunes, and all of these big, big questions there. You can find lots of bits and pieces of that all over Chicago.

**Janet Lorin** (4:38)
Talk about your trip to upstate New York. Marcus, I had not realized how much history there is because you don't think of upstate New York is having a lot other than beautiful places to hike these days.