Beverly Gage

and put them in a book recently.

And the authors that I interviewed are people like Ken Burns, Michael Beschloss, Chris Wallace, Max Boot, David Marinus, Beverly Gage, Admiral McRaven, David McCullough.

So American heroes like Admiral McRaven, who captured Osama bin Laden, were great authors.

you know, on subjects of history, or people like David Grand, who's written a lot of bestsellers, or Arthur Brooks, who's written a book about happiness, or Eric Smith about artificial intelligence.

J. Edgar Hoover, one of the world's, one of the country's most fascinating, infamous figures.

Talk to me about your conversation about J. Edgar.

Beverly Gage wrote a book.

She spent 15 years on it.

It just keeps going.

Anne Patchett's "Whistler," Beverly Gage's "This Land Is Your Land," giving a hard historical and political look

George Saunders' "Vigil," which is guaranteed to be a surreal boundary-pushing narrative

You have Camille Bordas with "One Son Only," Vincent Yu's "Seek Immediate Shelter," Rubica Rosaam's "Data Empire," dealing with the intersection of technology and society

But there's more to the story.

Yale historian Beverly Gage won the Pulitzer Prize for her brilliant twenty twenty-two biography G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.

In it, she charts the path by which the legendary FBI director fell from widespread public acclaim to his current notoriety.

Hoover served in eight presidential administrations and championed what we call conservative values today.

When we think of the idea of America, those ideas are often the ones presented to us via the nation's historians.

Beverly Gage is one of them.

She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale history professor and author of many books, including G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover, and The Making of the American Century.

Well, recently, Gage decided to do something interesting.

She's flipping the script, so to speak.

She decided to absorb American history in the way that most of us actually experience it rather than simply receive it.

To celebrate America's 250th? Beverly Gage went on a road trip.

And the result is her new book, This Land is Your Land, A Road Trip Through U.S. History.

This is On Point.

Historian Beverly Gage hit the road to learn about America's past.

She visited 300 places, museums, battlefields, even sex communes.

We're constantly shaping and reshaping each other.

42,000 new millionaires had been created.

So we meet the author of the book that I think this entire hour is based on, Beverly Gage, and her book is called The Day Wall Street Exploded.

So she said, for the first time in history, Europe now owes more money to the United States than the United States owes Europe.

And very possibly the last time.

It was commissioned by President McAnus.

It was led by Beverly Gage and Julia Adams, two very, very prominent intellectual leaders at Yale.

Jason Hockenberry, one of your colleagues and deputies, participated.

I think it was 10 persons that came out with a report that's gotten national attention as an exercise, very rigorous exercise in sort of self-analysis of the university.

Uh, well, let's see.

There's the book by Beverly Gage, the biography of J. Edgar Hoover.

Yeah.

G-Man I think it's called.

Welcome back to America at 250, the podcast of the America at 250 class.

I'm Beverly Gage, and I am here in the Yale studio with David Blight, who has just started his lectures this week and we're joined from New York by Joanne Freeman.

David, this is your first week of lectures.

We are barreling along through the 19th century.