The review of Beverly Gage’s This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History notes that before the 2015 Charleston church shooting, which killed nine people at Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina, Dylann Roof “spent months visiting local museums and plantations and churches, including Mother Emanuel,” as Gage writes. “When the police arrived, his car was strewn with travel brochures.”
The review points out that Gage’s work aims to help readers confront America’s complicated past—particularly when race is involved—and suggests we are all complicit in acts such as Roof’s, even if they seem unthinkable from a position of privilege.
Gage takes readers on tours of sites where figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, slaveholders, are venerated. The reviewer states that Gage acknowledges the Founders’ flaws but also notes her omission of LGBTQ+ figures despite the book’s focus on historical inclusion.
The text describes how Gage identifies Jefferson as “widely known not only as the author of the Declaration of Independence, 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.” However, DNA tests did not prove Jefferson’s paternity of any of Hemings’s children.
The review highlights that for a book devoted to celebrating those left out of conventional history, LGBTQ+ figures are entirely absent. Specifically, it mentions sites like Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village (the location of the 1969 Stonewall Riots) and San Francisco’s Castro district, where Harvey Milk was assassinated in 1978.
Published by Simon & Schuster with a print length of 352 pages and priced at $30, This Land Is Your Land is authored by Beverly Gage. The review was written by Alan Pell Crawford, who recently authored This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South, which won the American Battlefield Trust’s 2025 award for history.