837 America Obscura; This Land Is Your Land

23:49Rick Steves:So the second chapter would be Virginia and slavery. Tell me who the characters were there, and as a sightseer, what was most impactful. Virginia was a great example of that theme that we were talking about, which is a very small group of people in a pretty tight-knit community doing something that really transforms the nation. And in the case of Virginia, I was going to, of course, engage with presidential history since four of our first five presidents came from Virginia. But I also was really looking at this founding dilemma of freedom and slavery born side by side. And Virginia is really rich with that history.

24:31One thing that I saw in actually visiting as opposed to reading about it was, you know, how close together Madison and Jefferson and Monroe really lived, that they were neighbors. They were people who had this kind of local relationship.

24:48Rick Steves:They jammed together politically. Wow. I love that. And to humanize that, you know, when I talk about my European stuff, I always say it's an interesting time for us to be traveling. Europeans are curious. Be ready to talk. They're confused about what's going on in our country. Have a nice, tight definition of the electoral college, you know. The electoral college, when I think Virginia, I think the electoral college. Do you have a nice, tight definition of the electoral college for our listeners? Because it is so important in our political discussion, And, you know, how do you get enough votes in the Electoral College?

25:23Rick Steves:Where did that originate? Well, the Electoral College was one of the innovations that came about to sort of get the Constitution through, but to ensure that in a part of the world that was really just these small communities who were trying to stitch themselves together as a nation, of course, everyone's quite concerned about, first of all, protecting their own interests. And so you have this being state by state as opposed to mass popular vote. And then there's lots of worry that a democracy is going to be out of control. And so, you know, in its iteration, its original one, you had these intermediaries there who were really going to be casting the votes and deciding the president.

26:07That's the Electoral College.

26:08Rick Steves:There you go. Beverly Gage is our guest on Travel with Rick Steves. Beverly teaches American history at Yale University, and she won a Pulitzer for her 2023 biography, G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Making of the American Century. She's also written The Day Wall Street Exploded, a story of America in its first age of terror. You may have also seen her on C-SPAN and in the recent CNN documentary series, This Land. Beverly's latest book is a road trip through U.S. history, and it's called This Land is Your Land. The next chapter is the Westbrook expansion. It's so fun to track this story of our country.

26:46Rick Steves:And you call it oppression with a vengeance, centered in Tennessee. That's right. That is a chapter that really looks at Andrew Jackson, who is the towering political figure of the 1820s and 1830s. And it also looks at one of the really big things that he helped to carry out, which is Indian removal. And Tennessee is a great place to visit to put those things in conversation with each other because you can still go to Andrew Jackson's home and plantation, the Hermitage, but there's all sorts of fascinating work being done to document and memorialize the Trail of Tears and particularly the process of Cherokee removal.

27:33So it's just a rich state to see those stories right up against each other.

27:38Rick Steves:And maybe one of the takeaways there is how the legacy of a famous person can change over time. Give us a quick rundown on the plight of Andrew Jackson's reputation. Right. Andrew Jackson becomes president in the late 1820s. And for many years after that, decades, more than a century, he was really regarded as the father of the Democratic Party. He was the first, quote unquote, common man to be elected president. He was a champion of the common man, by which at the time was meant white but non-propertied men who could, during those years, come into full citizenship in the country. So that was Andrew Jackson's reputation.

28:24He was a brawler. You know, he was a champion of the ordinary person. He was a skeptic of intellectuals. He was really crucial to getting democratic politics. And here we also mean big D democratic as well as little d democratic politics off the ground. But really, in the last half century or so, people have gotten much more interested in his Indian policy, in some of the damage that that did, in the history of the Trail of Tears. So in the 21st century, Andrew Jackson has tended to be claimed by Republicans. You know, Donald Trump made a big deal about Andrew Jackson during his first term as being his favorite president.

29:08And a lot of Democrats now look a little askance at Jackson, largely because of his owning of slaves and then also because of his really pivotal role in Indian.

29:21Rick Steves:So if Trump was going to have a big wrestling match in the front yard of the White House, Andrew Jackson would have been right there in the front row. He would have. You know, one of the things he's most famous for is for his inauguration. He kind of threw open the gates and all the ordinary people came in and they smashed the furniture and they got really drunk. And, you know, and Andrew Jackson said, this is great. These are my people. Wow. OK. Then we move on to Texas, the Lone Star State and manifest destiny. How do we sort of psychoanalyze manifest destiny in the context of Texas? Yeah, the Texas chapter looks at mainly the 1830s and 1840s.

30:03So that's when Texas is breaking away from Mexico. And then, as it likes to tell everyone, was its own country for a few years before becoming incorporated into the United States,

30:20which, of course, is what acquired so much of the Western United States as American territory. And so Texas is a pretty fun place to visit and engage this history. One thing you learn when you go to Texas is that some states in the United States are much more interested in their own history than other states are. So I come from Connecticut. No one talks about Connecticut history. No one knows what the flag looks like. But if you go to Texas, you know, the Lone Star is everywhere. Texas schoolchildren are learning Texas history. And you see some of that energy at the Texas historic sites.

30:58Rick Steves:That's so interesting because I remember when I was going to school at the University of Washington, we had to get some credits of Washington state history. And I thought, are you kidding me? We're going to talk about the Pig War or whatever, you know. And it's like, no, you have to be proud of your state's history. Well, there would be no question about that in a place like Texas. This land is your land. This land is my land. From California to the New York Island. From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream water. This land was made for you and me. We're moving through history and the American landscape today on Travel with Rick Steves with Beverly Gage.

31:43Rick Steves:She's the author of This Land is Your Land, a road trip through U.S. history. Coming up, we'll take a deeper look at the myths that have been part of the American story and what it means to shake a few of them up. That's in just a minute on Travel with Rick Steves. Stay with us. Our conversation today with historian Beverly Gage has been taking us from the halls of the American Revolution through Andrew Jackson's legacy from the early 19th century, the Trail of Tears, and what's real and what isn't about the Alamo. Beverly, what are some of the myths that you realized you might be busting when you were working on this project?

32:22Well, to some degree, I was just taking up the work of other historians and the historic sites themselves who are engaged in this kind of wrestling with the past. At the Alamo, of course, it is one of the most myth-saturated sites in the whole United States. Right. The heroic story of the brave men who made their stand at the Alamo and sacrificed their lives against tyranny. And there are elements of that. I mean, Santa Ana was no great voice of democracy. But there is another side to that story that is actually particularly about slavery and about the ways in which settlers in Texas were very interested in protecting the institution of slavery, holding on to their own property.

33:09And Mexico was actually moving during those years to abolish slavery, to do away with it. And so that's not the heroic side of the Alamo story that we often hear.

33:20Rick Steves:Is the site free to talk about that fairly, or do you feel like it has a vested interest somehow in maintaining those myths? Well, I think the Alamo is a place that is still maybe leaning a little bit more on the mythic side than the self-examination side. There's lots of work being done on the Alamo Plaza, big expansions coming. So I'm very curious to see what they do there. But lots of other sites, you know, the Virginia sites, all of those places are really dealing with, you know, the complexities of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or James Madison as these men who championed liberty and actively engaged in, you know, large scale slaveholding.

34:05Rick Steves:Somewhere in the book, I remember you said something about, you may think this is about the battle, but it's actually about how we report the battle. There's that dynamic going on. I know that you've visited places that in the last few years have been changed just because of the values of the Trump administration. I've noticed that all over Europe, which again is my beat, great museums have reconsidered their treatment of historic characters and the prominence of women or the lack of prominence of women. And there's all sorts of sensibilities we have today that we didn't have even 50 years ago.

34:45Rick Steves:And it's a big job and it's a complicated job to update that but still be balanced. What have you noticed in the sightseeing that you've done? Is the struggle that way? And in your assessment, how are they doing? Yeah, well, I think you're absolutely right that particularly for this kind of public history, right, these sites are dealing not just with the past, but with a conversation between the present and the past. And so as the present continues to evolve and change, people have different questions about the past. They have different interests in the past. And there are bad versions of that when you say, oh, this thing that we know now, well, it must have been exactly the same, you know, 200 years ago.

35:30That's not great history. But there are all sorts of ways in which our own questions today can illuminate all these things about the past that we didn't think to ask, say, half a century ago or a century ago. So the book is about the actual history, but it's also about the history wars and conversations and struggles that are going to keep going on. And the funny thing about museums is some of them are responding very quickly, and then And others take quite a while to evolve on these kinds of questions. So I think there's just a huge range out there.

36:06Rick Steves:And there can be a political backlash. I mean, you could have the old status quo, which made privileged white people feel really good about our history. Then you could have the more politically correct reassessment. And then that could spawn a response from people who appreciated the status quo. And all of a sudden, you've got people from the government marching into museums and demanding that you change the wording of this and that and this and that. It's kind of a pendulum, isn't it? Yeah, these struggles go on. I think we're at a particularly alarming moment on this front right now because I did most of my traveling in 2023 and 2024.

36:40And even now, some of what I saw then has changed. And in particular, the National Park Service has been forced to put up signs that say, you know, if you see anything that disparages great Americans, please notify your federal government. I don't think that's a great way to do history for the record.

37:00Rick Steves:Right. This is Travel with Rick Steves, and we're exploring 250 years of U.S. history right now with Beverly Gage. She's written a book called This Land is Your Land, a road trip through U.S. history. Beverly is an acclaimed author and a professor of history and American studies at Yale, where her courses focus on 20th century U.S. history. We have more about Beverly in the notes to this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. So, Beverly, the next chapter that we cover in the book is the Civil War. and that would be the Confederacy, and you based that in South Carolina. Why South Carolina, and who were some characters that brought it to life for you?

37:39That's right. From Texas, I went up to upstate New York to look at the birth of abolitionism and women's rights, and then for the Civil War, I headed toward South Carolina. And so I said, you might not want to do the driving in the order that I describe it in the history, because that's going to send you from Texas to upstate New York, which is a long haul, let's say. But South Carolina was the place that I wanted to tell the story of the Civil War because it has all sorts of conflicting forces, both in the history and then in the historic representation now. So South Carolina is most famous as the birthplace of secession.

38:22And you could, of course, go out to Fort Sumter. That's still a really interesting and powerful historic site in its own right. But the National Park Service has also developed a set of sites that are about South Carolina's other civil war first, which is that it's the first place where experiments in reconstruction, in Black emancipation and Black land ownership and Black education happened within the Confederacy. That was in the Sea Islands, and that's largely just because, you know, the Union military came in and conquered that part of South Carolina very early on in the war. And so there's this fascinating story about all of these attempts to figure out what the post-Civil War world will look like.

39:07And you can go visit some of those sites now. They're now federal sites for visitors.

39:12Rick Steves:And then when you think about the Civil War, what, 160 years ago or something like that, you also think about the lasting scars of that great American tragedy that we live with today. Can you think of any takeaways from your road trip? What is in the DNA of the South compared to the North, and how is this struggle still alive? Well, you're right that it is still alive. And I think the Civil War, certainly in terms of historical tourism, is one of the great ruptures in American history and then is just a huge theme for visitors. And that's partly because it's the biggest war that ever happened on American soil.

39:56And so it's there in a physical sense in which a lot of the other major conflicts of the United States happened elsewhere or happened in pretty constrained spaces. But the Civil War, you know, particularly for the South, it was just everywhere. I knew I did not want to go to every Civil War battlefield. That was not my goal in this project. But you can see the ways in which these contests over Confederate memorials and how to narrate the Civil War, the centrality of slavery in the American past. These are all live issues that are being actively contested at many of the places that I went.

40:39Rick Steves:And then it seems like the natural next chapter would be the next chapter that you have in the book, the American West, creation of a national myth. And when you think about the Great West and all of the stories we grew up with, it really is creating that myth or that great heroic story of how exceptional we are and how the manifest destiny makes sense and how we will be sort of the shining example of a great nation in this planet. When you visit the West now, and I went to the Dakotas and to Wyoming and to Montana to look at this period of roughly the 1870s through the 1890s, which is this period of intensive settlement in that region and lots and lots of conflict over land, over governance, over law.

41:32And one of the things that you see now is that it was, and it's moment, a site, as you say, of American myth-making. And now a lot of the history is about reflecting on the myth makers. So now we have museums that are about the people who made the myths in the original iteration. And so we've got many, many layers to visit.

41:55Rick Steves:And then the next chapter would be dealing with a lot of the other side of the coin, and that is the ongoing struggle for civil liberties. And that is two different chapters. Why is it two different chapters? And what would your advice for us to really get some valuable takeaway from this epic road trip in regards to civil liberties. Yeah, there are two big things that were happening simultaneously in the late 19th century. One is this West story and the settlement and all of the conflict and aspirations that that brought with it. And the other was this intensive period of making cities, of urbanization.

42:32So I went to Chicago to look at that story and all the conflicts that emerged in those cities between police and protesters, between workers and employers. And Chicago is just a great place to see that all playing out because it's a city that was really created in that moment and created by those forces.

42:54Rick Steves:And the finale is Disneyland. I thought that was really interesting. We're going from Philadelphia, Independence Hall, and we finish in sort of the Californian dream with, the Nixon and the Reagan presidential libraries, but just the fantasy land stuff. Why California as a final stop? Well, California is fun to visit. You know, in any good road trip, you've got to go coast to coast. That's true. But historically, Southern California in particular is really important, both because it produces a set of political currents that I think still shape the world wherein the modern conservative movement is born in Orange County in lots of ways.

43:38We get these figures like Nixon and Reagan. And then it was also the place that produced some of the most popular stories and myths about America, Disneyland being really the center of that story. Though I also went to Knott's Berry Farm, which is a much lesser known amusement park also in Orange County. And I had to go there because it includes a replica of Independence Hall all the way across the country down there in Southern California. So the book really goes from Independence Hall to Independence Hall.

44:13Rick Steves:That is such a great idea to have as underpinnings for your road trip, whether you do the whole thing or not, a sensibility that you can learn on the road and you can better appreciate the true story, the complexity of our story as a nation on its 250th birthday. When she's not on the road, Beverly Gage teaches American history at Yale University. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her book on former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and she's our guest today on Travel with Rick Steves. Her latest title is This Land is Your Land and takes us on 13 road trips to help us visit the places where American history was made and to help widen our perspective on the USA.

44:57Rick Steves:You'll find links to Beverly's work in the notes for this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio If some of the people today in power read your book they would have some grounds against you How do you balance that as a historian, as an author when you have critics saying your book was too negative or you're not being patriotic enough or you're, you know you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't these days if you write a history book I think that that's really true And with this book, I went into it wanting to explore some of the tensions between whether you can really know and understand your history, still say you love your country and that you're a patriot.

45:38I think that you can do both of those things in a deep way. But I didn't expect that everyone would have exactly the same view on that question as I did. And I also wanted to get a little bit out of where we've gotten stuck in our historical discourse, which is some people saying, if you're a patriot, you can only say good things about the country. And others saying, no, the only things that matter about the United States are its history of injustice and empire. And, you know, that's just not how history works. It's not all one or the other. It's not all either winners or losers. It's this incredibly interesting, dynamic story, and that's what I wanted to capture in this book.

46:21Rick Steves:And you did it beautifully. And in your epilogue, you talked about the advent of some sites that really are going to bat for ideals and priorities of the far right, the Museum of the Bible. And I hadn't even heard of this, the Victims of Communism Museum. Tell me about your take on those museums, or what is the trend in that regard? Right. Right. Those are a couple of new museums, both in Washington, D.C. And they are, of course, museums that are taking a very particular view of the history they want to tell. And they're putting that front and center in the title. And there were lots of places like that.

47:00Probably the most interesting one that I went to was in Columbia, Tennessee at the new National Confederate Museum, which is trying to, you know, double down on the story of the Civil War from a Confederate perspective. But that's a new museum. And so you've got a lot of activity around this all over the country.

47:22Rick Steves:So as we sightsee, and I always think about that when I'm on the road anywhere. If I'm in Northern Ireland and the museum is paid for by Great Britain, the take on the Irish potato famine is going to be different than if I'm in Dublin or Galway. If I'm in Palestine, the take I get from a museum is going to be different than the take I get from a museum about the same topic in Tel Aviv. And as we travel, it's fascinating to be mindful of who's paying for this. And do they have an agenda? And is it designed to be fair and balanced or is it designed to promote one particular angle? To what degree do we need to be concerned about that as we happily and giddily go through our trip?

48:07Well, I think it's a great way actually to make the history live, that you're not just going to look at the history that's being displayed, but to ask these really important questions. Not only who's funding this, but what is this interpretation that's being presented? Do I agree with it to the degree that I know the history? How do I understand it? And if you go to enough of them, which I did, I don't know if anyone else out there is going to go to every single place that I went. But you can see that this is a conversation and that those museums are also talking to each other and arguing with each other.

48:47Rick Steves:Beverly, this has been such a delight. In the very end of your book, you actually get down to a few practical travel tips for this epic road trip. just three things I'd just like to touch on before we say goodbye. You said plan ahead, but not too much. That's right. I planned my trips so that I had a general sense of where I wanted to go. I had my plane tickets on either side because sometimes I was just flying in and then leaving and doing the road trip in the region. But I didn't want to be so tightly planned that I couldn't stop and be surprised and take wrong turns. And that was where I learned so much.

49:26Rick Steves:And you made a point to recommend that we listen to other people with contrary views. I think history is about curiosity. And actually, particularly in a moment like this, where people are finding it so hard to have those conversations about the present, sometimes you can have those conversations about the past in a way that's meaningful. And I love how you concluded by saying, remember what Woody Guthrie said. This Land is Your Land. That's right. It's, of course, a famous song, a patriotic anthem. But what I love about that song is that it is both an act of patriotism and an act of protest at the same time.

50:08That's why Woody Guthrie wrote it. I wanted some of that to animate my book. And you can sing along when you're out on the road.

50:14Rick Steves:There you go. Beverly Gage, thanks for writing This Land is Your Land and best wishes in your teaching. Thanks so much, Rick.

50:26Travel with Rick Steves is produced by Tim Tatton with Kazma Hall and Donna Bardsley at Rick Steves Europe in Edmonds, Washington. Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Court upload the shows to our website. Sheila Gerzoff handles affiliate promotions. Our theme music is by Jerry Frank. Take a look at Rick's list for what to pack in your suitcase and share tips with fellow travelers.

50:48Rick Steves:It's part of our online travel forum. It's at ricksteves.com. We'll see you next week with more Travel with Rick Steves.

51:23Rick Steves:sail the sacred Ganges, and look into the eyes of the virgin goddess as you stow away with me on the legendary Hippie Trail. My book, On the Hippie Trail, is available wherever books are sold.