Your Land, My Land, Our Land

Your Land, My Land, Our Land

From Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger by Jay Nordlinger

June 10, 2026 · 46 min

About this episode

Beverly Gage discusses her new book on U.S. history and shares insights on historical figures and writing.

Beverly Gage is a professor at Yale and has a new book, timed for our 250th anniversary: This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip through U.S. History . In a Q&A , we talk about this book and plenty more. “Q&A,” by the way, is the name of my podcast. For an interview show, it is not an especially imaginative name, but it serves. Professor Gage grew up outside Philadelphia. “When you were a girl,” I ask her, “did you read history like a fiend or did that come later?” She read “pretty widely,” she says. This reading included the trilogy by John Jakes about the Civil War— North and South . They were huge sellers, those books. Beverly was a musician: violinist, pianist, conductor. In college, however, she gravitated to other interests. She went to Yale and then, for graduate school, to Columbia. Can she name us a few of her favorite historians? Historians of the U.S., that is? She gives me two names: W. E. B. Du Bois (who, in addition to everything else he did, wrote a history of Reconstruction) and Richard Hofstadter. One thing those two had in common is: they could write like angels. That counts, when it comes to engaging a reader … In 2022, Professor Gage published a biography…

People in this episode

Host: Jay Nordlinger

Guest: Beverly Gage

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Yale, Columbia

Books & works: This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip through U.S. History, G-Man

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