It’s that time of year again — the season when thousands of American families get busy making plans to stuff their vehicles with snacks and backpacks and hit the highway on their own versions of the great American road trip.Why, exactly, is the road trip considered quintessentially “American”? Surely folks in other countries drive around to look at historical plaques and scenic vistas, too. We posed this question to Beverly Gage, a professor of history and American studies at Yale University and the author of the new book “This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History.” The United States, Gage said, is large: “That sense of expanse is a lot of what road trips are about. We live in a diverse country, in terms of its geography, its people, its culture, its history.” Americans have “a lot of internal curiosity” about people and places in other parts of the nation, she said. Get Starting PointA guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.Enter Email“And Americans have always liked travel and mobility. Those things are kind of baked into the story of the United States.”To prove this point, she opens her book with some notes on an early American road-tripper: none other than George Washington himself. Six months into his presidency, Washington embarked on a fact-finding mission, traveling from the original presidential mansion in New York City to the New England states, and then through the Carolinas and Georgia.“Washington recognized that most Americans identified far more with their town or state or region than with the cobbled together entity known as the United States,” Gage writes. Beverly Gage's new book, "This Land is Your Land."Simon & SchusterHer book is an account of her visits to 13 places that represent a symbolic march through 250 years of American history, from the Pennsylvania home of the Continental Congress to the Alamo in Texas, the mythic West of the Dakotas and Montana, and the industrial marvel of Detroit. It’s no coincidence that the number of chapters aligns with the number of weeks in a typical course at Yale, Gage said during a recent talk about her book at the Concord Museum. “I do think of this as a stealth American History survey course,” she said with a smile. Having spent a decade working on her epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Edgar Hoover, “G-Man” (2023), Gage was looking for a palate-cleansing project that would feel like a working vacation. Yes, there’s a lot of history in “This Land Is Your Land,” but there are also plenty of souvenir shops and dodgy tourist attractions. Beverly GageSimon & SchusterIn between clear-eyed encounters with Andrew Jackson’s “Indian removal” project and the abolitionist and women’s rights movements in the so-called “Burned-Over District” of central New York, Gage treks to the tiny North Dakota town of Medora, which operates as a year-round Teddy Roosevelt theme park, and that most American of destinations, Disneyland. Naturally, she spent her time there not on the thrill rides but watching a documentary about Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.With the nation’s 250th anniversary fast approaching, she said, she made her intermittent road trips with two goals in mind.“I wanted to find a way to have fun and do something that people could connect to, something they could take as a set of tools for themselves,” Gage said. She also wanted to “contend with these really big and difficult issues in American history. It was a challenge, actually, to get the right balance and find the right voice.”As a young grad student, she went through a Jack Kerouac phase, while recognizing that the classic cross-country trip his 1957 book “On the Road” represents feels like a very male undertaking. (“Can girls do this?” she asked.) As a scholar, she said, she has been drawn to the accounts of the Marquis de Lafayette’s tour of the United States ahead of the 50th anniversary of the American Revolution, and to Alexis de Tocqueville’s travels in the young country a few years later, which resulted in his seminal “Democracy in America.” She also loves the droll, history-drenched travelogues of the late Tony Horwitz.“One of the big tensions of American history is it is both a nation-state, in the sense that it’s a particular piece of land bounded by particular borders, and it’s also a set of ideas — the founding documents,” Gage said. “So I think a road trip is a way of exploring both of those parts of what it means to be an American at once.”For her book title, she borrowed the name of Woody Guthrie’s best-known anthem. It’s an obvious invitation to go out and explore the vastness of America, she said. The phrase also implies a complicated tangle of contradictions, just like the country itself.“What I love about that song is it was intended both as a celebration and a protest,” Gage said. “That combination is really what I wanted to be doing with this book. You can love your country and know your history.”James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.