Then I became a historian. As part of my academic training, I took a more tempered and realistic look at the United States, with all of its contradictions and injustices. I also learned to be skeptical of self-congratulatory narratives: progress, manifest destiny, shining-city-on-a-hill exceptionalism. Historians tend to be myth-busters. We love to declare that things are not as they appear, that they're messier than you think, and that some version of what people are experiencing today has actually happened before. It's what I've tried to do in most of my research and writing. In 2022, I published a biography of the longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—perhaps the greatest villain of 20th-century U.S. politics—in which I argued that he was more complicated and interesting than his fearsome caricature might suggest.

But a funny thing can happen when you sit alone at a desk for years, poring over the papers of one strange, long-dead man. You end up really wanting to be around some other people. Plus, you start to forget why you wanted to study history in the first place. What originally fascinated me about history was the challenge of creating human understanding across great divides of time and culture and background. My students say they study history for similar reasons: They want to meet the people of the past, and thus learn how the world we inhabit came to be. This is empathy. And there's not much enthusiasm for it in today's tribal politics, where we're all encouraged to double down on who and what we already think we know. But empathy is essential if you want to understand history—and if you want to understand America.

With the country's semiquincentennial—or 250th birthday—on the horizon, I figured it was a good time to step out of the proverbial ivory tower and check in with the past as it exists here and now, in the third decade of the 21st century. I headed not for Washington, D.C., where recent mandates to teach "patriotic education" have precious little to do with the actual past. Instead, I set off to explore the museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, monuments, living-history pageants, battlefield reenactments, and souvenir shops where Americans so often go to learn—and fight—about their history. This book is a report of my travels: thirteen chapters in thirteen American places. It's also a guide for anyone who wants to get out there and see the American past for themselves.

Hitting the road offered the pull of gorgeous landscapes and weird little museums, plus a chance to be the student rather than the teacher for a change. But there was a push too. In recent years, I've been alarmed about our national historical dialogue, which tends to emphasize veneration or damnation over real understanding. Throughout the country, school boards and state legislatures have banned "divisive concepts"; in order to appreciate your country, they suggest, you have to ignore most of it. Others have insisted that the truth about the United States can be found only in its greatest sins and darkest moments, and that it is our duty, as citizens of the 21st century, to condemn those who came before. Neither analysis captures what the past was really like. And neither one accounts for the challenges and contradictions that have always been at the heart of what it means to be American.

As a citizen, I love my country, and I hate when its patriotic symbols—the flag, the national anthem, the founding—have been co-opted by narrow-minded people who claim that they, and they alone, are the true Americans. As a historian, I also know that the United States has a deep and troubling history of inequality and injustice. Though you wouldn't necessarily realize it from the state of our political discourse, it's possible to hold both sets of ideas—to know your history and still love your country. Americans can be patriots and critics, citizens and dissenters, all at once.

Nowhere is that more evident than at our country's historic sites, which are so often tasked with making collective narratives out of our imperfect past. Despite recent pressures to downplay the "negative" parts of American history, public sites do not have the luxury of talking to only one audience, or of seeing only what they want to see. Their doors are open to any traveler with the time, courage, and curiosity to walk in and start asking questions.

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This book is for everyone who wants to find American history—to experience it and confront it, to celebrate it and condemn it—in the places where it happened. The title, This Land Is Your Land, comes from the famous 1940s folk song by Woody Guthrie, who composed it as both a tribute to and a critique of America at a moment of national soul-searching and crisis. The book's format is inspired by the many history-themed road trips I have taken with friends and family over the years. My son Nick, now all grown up, jokes that most of what he knows about American history came from family trips to such glamorous places as the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and William Henry Harrison's tomb. Parents, if you choose to follow in my footsteps, feel free to tell your children that all the reenactments and museums and living-history pageants are part of an epic assignment from a history teacher. They'll appreciate it someday.