Your Land, My Land, Our Land

Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger · Jun 10, 2026 · 46m · transcript

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…