-So we have two distinguished authors, and we're gonna go through an interview with them about their latest books.

This is covered live on C-SPAN.

So when we come to questions from the audience, please recognize you're gonna be on TV.

And if you want to say something inappropriate, don't do so, okay?

Or unless you'll have a lot of people writing you.

Okay?

So let's start, uh, Isaac, with you.

Isaac is a biblical name.

Uh, Fitzgerald is probably not a biblical name.

So, um, is that an unusual combination?

Where did you get that name?

-Absolutely.

And that's a great way to open, because a lot of the book, "American Rambler," which is about following the path of Johnny Appleseed, is also just very much about my family and our personal story.

My book before that, "Dirtbag, Massachusetts," opens with the line, "My parents were married when they had me, just to different people."

[ Laughter ] And they met, believe it or not, at an Old Testament theology class.

And so when I was born, I was named William as actually my first name for my father.

Isaac was the name for me -- God's "laughter."

And my mother at the time was keeping her maiden name, so I was actually Hellen.

But they got married three years later.

I showed up at the wedding as a three-year-old.

And I eventually became William Isaac Fitzgerald.

-Rubenstein: I got it.

Okay.

So your clothing would indicate you have an unusual kind of, uh, approach to presenting yourself.

So the hat is part of your life.

-Yes.

The hat is very much part of my life.

Again, the title of the book is "American Rambler."

One of the things that a friend who does travel and is an outdoorsman who read the book immediately felt was, "You are underprepared.

You are naive.

I worried about you the whole time.

I still don't think you understood how much danger you put yourself in."

But this is who I am.

I try to dress light so that I can move and walk and meet people and communicate with them.

And I try to be unintimidating in the way that I dress.

But I'm from Boston with a cowboy hat, so that's my own fault.

-What did your parents say when you showed up with all those tattoos?

-[ Laughs ] Listen, they didn't love it.

And then my first book -- and they loved books.

My parents loved reading.

They are the ones that gave me the desire to be a writer.

They are the ones that made me the reader that I am today.

But they immediately didn't like the tattoos.

Then I did my first book, and it was about tattoos.

They didn't like that.

Second one about tattoos, didn't like that.

Then I did a kids book, "How to Be a Pirate" -- also about tattoos... [ Laughter ] ...and they came around kind of around then.

-Wow.

Okay.

So you do recommend tattoos to people, right?

-No.

Great question.

I consider myself like an old Subaru.

I'm an old jalopy from the '80s.

I've got a Greenpeace bumper sticker on.

You know, there's just a lot of bumper stickers on this old jalopy.

So for me, it's nothing.

I can add them.

But if you're a blank canvas and it's not for you, it's not for you, and I think that's wonderful.

Many ways to move through the world.

-But I notice a lot of tattoos on your hands.

Is that the only part of your body that has tattoos?

-No, there's -- there's -- there's... [ Laughs ] I won't... We're live on C-SPAN, so I'm not gonna -- but they're there.

But the one that's most significant to this book, this book is very much the journey of -- I grew up unhoused, so I grew up in the Catholic Worker in Boston in a homeless shelter.

And this story is very much about me grappling with, you know, this wonderful American figure -- I would argue one of our greatest American saints -- but also grappling with my own desire to have a home and then to slowly recognize not only do I deserve a home but that I want a home.

And so these tattoos, which I got long before I worked on the book.

-Says "Come home."

-Says "Come home."

And those are probably the ones that are most prevalent to the book.

-All right, Beverly, you don't seem to have a lot of tattoos on you.

You're not a tattoo aficionado?

-Well, I do actually have one, but it's in a place that I'm not gonna show you.

-[ Laughter ] -Oh, okay.

Okay, we'll go on to the next subject, then.

So, um, Beverly wrote one of the finest biographies I've ever read, and it's the one on J. Edgar Hoover, "G-Man," and I highly recommend it to people.

We're not gonna talk about that too much today, but we've done that here before, and it's a spectacular biography.

Why did you choose to write another book that is not a biography?

It's more of a travelog around the United States on historic sites.

Why did you do that?

-Well, I spent more than a decade working on that biography of J. Edgar Hoover, and that meant a couple of things.

One was that I did a lot of that work sitting at my desk, sitting with documents, many of them redacted, trying to figure out what actually happened in history.

And then it also meant that I had to spend a lot of time with J. Edgar Hoover in particular, which was something of a mixed bag.

The FBI director whose name is still on -- for now -- on the building here in, um... -[ Scattered applause ] -...in DC.

-Well, you think somebody might change the name and put somebody else's name on it?

[ Laughter ] -We shall see.

I don't know whose name would go up there, but... And you don't have any experience with that, I know, David, uh [laughs] -So, okay, so now what you did is you took historic sites and they are, let's say, about 25 to 30 or 40 historic sites in the United States -- the Alamo, um, Valley Forge, Independence Hall -- and you kind of visited them.

You did that with who?

-Right, well, this book is -- the subtitle is "A Road Trip Through U.S.

History."

And that is what it is supposed to be for this 250th anniversary.

So there are 13 different chapters.

Each one is both a place and a moment in time.

And I did that partly because I love doing this kind of travel, going out to historic sites.

It was a really nice thing to do after working on a project that was so long and so solitary.

And so, yeah, it's really supposed to be a guide for people who like doing that kind of travel.

This travel I mostly did on my own, though occasionally I have my son with me and then my husband.

-Okay, so before I go back to Isaac, I want to ask you a question.

Of all the historic sites you toured, what is the one, it is the most memorable in your mind and the one you would most highly recommend to people that they visit if they're gonna to visit any one historic site?

-Mm, that is a great question.

Um, I will pick something that's a little off the beaten path.

This book has many famous places.

As you said, I go to Independence Hall and I go to the Alamo and Mount Rushmore and Disneyland, which I maintain is a very powerful historic site, which I can expand upon.

But one of the places where I learned the most was a teeny little town in the Mississippi Delta called Mound Bayou.

And Mound Bayou is just a fascinating place.

It's a town that was founded by formerly enslaved people in the late 19th century, and it survived through the era of Jim Crow as this autonomous, self-governing, prosperous Black city in one of the most difficult places to survive.

So now they're building up their history.

They're really thinking about it.

So it's a place most people wouldn't go, but I recommend it.

-Isaac, um, let's talk about your new book.

Um, where did you get the idea of following Johnny Appleseed's path across the country?

And by the way, who was Johnny Appleseed?

-Absolutely.

So Johnny Appleseed was a real guy, and he was born right before the start of the Revolutionary War.

His father was a minuteman, and he was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, before making his way with his family to Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

But then at a very young age, he and his half brother set out, as many were doing at the time, looking for more land, and he set out basically into Western Pennsylvania, eventually goes on into Ohio and then on into Indiana.

And so what I was interested in doing was following his path.

I was interested in kind of using this man, who is so much a legend, right?

There's this Disney version that we have.

I can't sing the song because we're on television, but I'm sure some of you are familiar with it, if not most of you.

And there's this idea that he was just throwing apple seeds willy-nilly, just, again, this great American saint.

But actually, he was very, very well planned in his planting.

He was partnering with local settlers.

He was making orchards.

And this was all a form of land speculation.

Now, don't get me wrong, though, because he is still a kook.

And that's what I love about him.

He never had a home address.

He would live off the kindness of strangers.

So part of my -- my mission was to -- I never stayed in a hotel, I was going to live off the kindness of strangers, and I was going to either crash with friends or crash with people I met.

-Rubenstein: Where did you stay?

-All sorts of different floors.

A lot of sleeping in tents outside when the kindness of strangers failed me.

But all jokes aside, this was the legend.

This was the glass that I could all of a sudden walk around -- it was an excuse to travel around and look at this country at an eye level.

-What was his original name?

-His original name was John Chapman.

And I genuinely found so much hospitality, so much kindness.

I'm sure you found this in your travels too.

I found so -- so many of us, we're so much better when we get into the same space, when we're in the same room, when we get a little bit away from our phones.

And so a real part of this book is walking away from loneliness and towards community.

And for me, the way the book started, the idea started was I wrote a book during the pandemic -- or, I'm sorry, I wrote a piece for "The Guardian" during the pandemic.

It was 20,000 words long.

I'm sorry, that's not true.

I'm sorry, I walked 20,000 steps a day.

I wrote a piece about that.

The reaction I got to that piece was overwhelming.

So my -- at the time girlfriend, now wife, very smart woman, when I was thinking about my next book, was like, "What are you thinking about?

Is there something with this walking?

You have such a connection there so clearly."

And I said, "Oh!

Johnny Appleseed.

He was a great American walker."

And my now wife said, "That's not a real guy!"

[ Laughter ] And this is -- this is often people think he's like Paul Bunyan, not a real guy, Pecos Bill, not a real guy.

But actually he was a real guy named John Chapman, who was very complex, just like this country's history, which your book does so well.

It's -- he's a very complex individual that had been basically put on this pedestal.

And I don't want to tear him off of his pedestal.

I want to admit that the world is a better place not when we just look at the good stuff, but also not when we just look at the bad stuff.

When we bring it together and we look at the three-dimensionality, that's when I think this country is at its best, our history is at its best, and we are at our best.

So that's what he allowed me to do.

-Who gave him the name Johnny Appleseed?

Was that post his death or what?

-So -- So basically he became famous when he was still alive because he was the Paul Revere of the War of 1812, which is funny because nobody remembers that part of his story now.

But there was an attack in, uh, in Mansfield, Ohio, and he ran over 30 miles -- walked and ran over 30 miles -- to Mount Vernon, Ohio, to gather troops and come back.

So he was the Paul Revere of the War of 1812.

So that elevated him.

Some people called him Apple or -- there was that.

But it wasn't until a "Harper's Bazaar" article, 20 years after his death where he really was -- was heroized.

-Okay, so if I wanted to take a child on a tour of American historic sites, what, one, two, or three sites do you think a child of 12, 13, 14, 15 years old would be most impressed with -- the ones you saw?

-Well, Disneyland.

-[ Laughter ] -I want to hear that.

Make that -- can you make that case real quick?

I just want to hear it.

-So here's my case for why Disneyland is actually a historic site.

I went to the Disneyland in California -- the original Disneyland -- not Disney World in Florida.

And what's really interesting about it from a historian's perspective is, first, to think about the context in which it was created.

It was opened in 1955 at a moment of real anxiety about American patriotism, about American national identity.

And Disney was incredibly explicit about wanting to make this a place where Americans would come explore some of the biggest questions.

Now, he did it in a particularly Disney way, right?

So he has this whole kind of heroic story about both the past and the present and the future of the U.S., but that story is baked into how Disneyland still is today.

If you go down Main Street, U.S.A., that is Walt Disney's vision of America at the turn of the century, the America of his childhood.

Or Frontierland, which is still one of the big places that you go.

That's about the American frontier.

It has, you know, a sort of Johnny Appleseed-ish character in the sense that was both a real person and then also became this myth.

A lot of it was centered around Davy Crockett, who also has a song that I also will not sing but that many people know in the audience.

So, and you can still find glimmers of that today.

When I walked around, I was like, "Where's all the Davy Crockett stuff?"

And they're like, "We don't really do that anymore," but you can find pieces of it.

-Suppose I wanted to see a site where there was a battle, and you have the Alamo, you have Fort Sumter, and you have Little Bighorn.

Which one -- if I only have time for one, which one would you recommend?

-Wow, that is a hard question.

So I did know, in writing this book, that I did not want to go to every Civil War battlefield, in particular, which would be an entirely different book and one that people have written.

But I would actually say the Alamo, because the Alamo is a place where you can see historical interpretation coming alive.

So it is a place that is saturated in myth as Texas -- -Of course we lost.

-Right, right.

So it's one of these strange American stories.

Little Bighorn is like this.

-Davy Crockett killed there.

-Where Davy Crockett's killed at the Alamo.

Everyone gets slaughtered at Little Bighorn.

And yet those stories of martyrdom become heroized and mythologized.

And so you see those pieces at the Alamo, but it's also a place that's going through lots of transformations in the present.

I will say -- I had to go back twice, because a new museum opened between the time that I first went and went back, And that museum features the Alamo artifact collection of Phil Collins.

Yes, Phil Collins.

So, Phil Collins, the British rock star, apparently saw the Disney show about Davy Crockett when he was young, became kind of obsessed with the Alamo, and then spent a lot of his rock-star money buying Alamo historic artifacts that he's now donated to the city of San Antonio.

So history is both a fixed set of events and a conversation that's always changing.

And you can just see that really well in the Alamo.

-So what did Johnny Appleseed actually accomplish in his life?

In other words, if you hadn't written this book, what would people say that he actually accomplished?

-So, genuinely, he actually amassed a lot of wealth.

And so this is, again, this is -- the things that fascinate me and something I love to explore in my writing is juxtapositions, right, are things -- I think everything is just more complex than we, especially in this modern era, allow for.

And he is, when you picture him, right, you're picturing a tin-pot hat.

Sadly not true.

You're picturing maybe a rucksack, like a coffee bag, almost, shirt.

True.

Because he was actually -- he was also very -- in this religion that still exists to this day -- he was a Swedenborgian, which was a mystic kind of cult version of Christianity.

And so he believed the more he suffered in this life, the more he would be rewarded in the next.

And he was a proselytizer of this religion.

So he was actually a great speaker.

So that's how a stranger would welcome him into their home because he would preach.

But anyways, so you picture somebody very poor, but actually through the planting of his orchards -- which, land was wealth at that time -- when he passes away -- in his 70s, mind you.

Great for that time period.

So walking is healthy for you.

It's good.

Do it.

Uh, he genuinely -- he passes away, on paper, a very wealthy man, but he never touched it.

He never laid claim to it, nor did he have any heirs, so it went back to other members of his family.

-So, all right, let me ask you, where is he buried now?

-So he died in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

And they have a wonderful Johnny Appleseed Festival every September.

It's coming up.

That is in the book.

Also in Fort Wayne is a minor-league baseball team called the Fort Wayne TinCaps, and that is a beautiful story, and another part of the American story, which is they revitalized the city around this stadium that they built right downtown, very similar to -- to the Orioles' stadium.

And I genuinely loved the place so much, the whole chapter in the book is dedicated to it.

And then they had me back to throw a first pitch.

-Are there any apple-- -We're not gonna talk about how it went.

-Are there any apple trees anywhere still around because of him?

-Yes.

So there's a woman, Patty Smith, who I literally -- I didn't e-mail, I didn't call, I just showed up at her door in Ohio, knocked on it.

And I said, "I'm so sorry.

I probably smell terrible.

Can I get your contact info and we can come back?"

And she invited me right in, water, lemonade, sat me right down.

And in their front yard is laid claim the last known planted-by-Johnny Appleseed tree still in verifiable existence.

And again, seeds from that tree have literally been to space.

So this is what I like.

There's so much Americana that can be told through this one individual.

And again, getting back at what in your book is also the complexity of the history, there's so much brutality that also happened with this westward expansion that when you are educated, you know, they're kind of like, Revolutionary War, some stuff, Civil War, some stuff, World War II.

Um, and we miss all of this -- these incredible ways in which there was so much conflict and so much difficulty in these times that often get overlooked.

-I see.

So did he -- his motto was, "An apple tree a day will keep you alive for a long time"?

-My man.

I'm so glad you said that.

Here's -- the best part about this, and what drew me to him is, all those apples, people think they're for apple pies, apple tarts, apples to feed the settlers.

No.

It was all for alcohol.

[ Laughter ] I'm sorry.

And vinegar.

Alcohol and vinegar for storage.

But genuinely, it's when we found that out that my then girlfriend, now wife said, "I think we found our guy for you."

And so, actually, when Prohibition happens, apple trees get attacked.

The government actually, because an apple tree was actually a sign that you were making your own booze.

So the 18th Amendment, right, Prohibition, and then the 21st Amendment brings it back.

And apples needed a new P.R.

And it's around then that they started being "An apple a day keeps the doctor away."

They rebranded themselves, basically, as a health food.

Luckily, they are actually healthy.

But you can also make booze with them.

-I got it.

So when you were doing your trips, you're visiting, do you tell people at the site, "I'm writing a book about this.

I want special access to stuff," or do you just show up as a regular tourist?

-I just showed up as a regular tourist, in part because I wanted to have that experience, and I thought if I showed up saying, "I'm a historian from Yale," I might have, particularly for tour guides, you might end up with a different sort of story.

So I did it all relatively anonymous.

I did stay in hotels and drive cars and things, like I think most people would.

I had a few adventures of particularly interesting hotels.

I stayed at a 19th-century former sex commune in New York State, which you can go to.

And I also spent the night in a nuclear missile silo in Roswell -- outside of Roswell, New Mexico, which you can also do because it has been converted into an Airbnb.

So those were sort of saturation history experiences, but mostly I was just trying to go around as any tourist would.

In fact, I was going around for some of it in my car, which was an old Subaru.

You likened yourself to an old Subaru, so that's sort of a theme.

-So, how -- did you take a leave from Yale to do this, or did you just do it on weekends when you had free time?

How long did it take you to do this trip?

-Well, I didn't do it as one seamless trip.

I did it as 13 local trips.

So if I could drive there directly from where I live in Connecticut, I would drive.

Often I would fly in, I would rent a car, and then the road trip would be through a particular region.

So I was on leave from the university, and I did this -- I'd say if it was all smashed together, it was six or seven months, but they were mostly about 10-day trips.

-Well, let's talk about the East Coast.

If I wanted to visit one of the historic sites on the East Coast, what would be the historic site you would most recommend I visit?

Independence Hall?

Mount Vernon?

What would you say?

Williamsburg?

-I think Philadelphia really is -- and so it's my hometown so I'm a little bit biased, but I really do think Philadelphia is an amazing place, particularly in this 250 year, to think about the country's origins.

It's a place where there's all sorts of new historical conversation happening.

But since we're in D.C., I feel that I actually have to say Virginia, which is the second chapter of the book, and I think is particularly powerful to look at the nation's origins and some of the contradictions and tensions that Isaac was talking about.

You know, places like Monticello and Mount Vernon, they are forced and are embracing the challenge of thinking about all of those pieces.

-Now, when I was in college a long time ago, the average number of history majors in the United States colleges, maybe 7% to 8%.

Now it's like 1% or 2%.

You teach at Yale.

Why are students not that interested in history?

And the ones that are interested, why are they interested?

-Great question.

So I will say the history major at Yale is doing pretty well.

It's true that when I got there 22 years ago, which is when I started teaching at Yale, it was the number one major.

Now it's the number three major, so we have fallen behind econ and political science.

But there's still lots of interest.

And I think there's a real contradiction out there, because as this audience suggests, there's a huge public appetite for thinking about history, for using history as a set of tools to understand where we are in the present.

But I think that a lot of students of this generation have been sort of scared off from history, as if it's not practical, as if it isn't going to, you know, in a very direct way, get you a job coming out.

So I do think we're at a little bit of a crossroads in American education, thinking about what it is that we're trying to do there.

And these history battles are really at the center of that.

-Now, you won the Pulitzer Prize for your book on J. Edgar Hoover.

And the book is 600, 700, 800 pages.

I can't remember, but it's long.

So if somebody is watching and they're not sure if they want to read that whole book, and they just want to know a little bit about why J. Edgar Hoover is interesting, what would you tell people in a couple of paragraphs about why it's worth learning more about J. Edgar Hoover?

-Well, no, you have to read all 800 pages.

No.

[ Laughter ] -The hardcover or the paperback.

Doesn't make a difference.

-Exactly, exactly.

Well, since we're in D.C., I will say first of all, the story of J. Edgar Hoover is a story of Washington, D.C.

He was born here.

He died here.

And his whole career is really the story of the American government as it grew and as D.C.

was transformed during his lifetime.

In a practical sense, he was FBI director from 1924 under Calvin Coolidge to 1972 under Richard Nixon.

So 48 years he was there and had his fingers in almost everything that happened in American politics and in Washington during those years.

And so that book is a story of his life, and he's a weird and interesting man with a strange set of personal characteristics.

But it's really a story about the country and the government and the city of Washington as it came of age.

-Let me ask you about Johnny Appleseed again.

Um, did he have tattoos?

-[ Laughs ] No, Johnny Appleseed did not have tattoos.

But one of -- I will say, one of the things that so fascinates me about -- and again, to talk about J. Edgar Hoover as well, like, the ways in which we can see how these people were formed by the times that they lived in.

And that's one of the things that so draws me to John Chapman's story.

And again, it was just -- it was coincidence.

It was beautiful timing that this kind of American experiment that we all live in was reaching its 250th anniversary.

But if I could just say one last quick thing about -- you yourself mentioned that you hit the major parks, but you actually believe in these smaller things.

That is another thesis of this book, is how important are not just national -- Don't get me wrong.

Hit the bucket-list items.

If you want to see the Grand Canyon, go see the Grand Canyon.

But there are so many, as you know, like, state forests, national forests, rivers.

There is so many third spaces out there where we can still go and enjoy them.

And so much of this world that we live in now is being put behind a paywall.

You have to spend money.

But these parks, they belong to us.

And the more that you can -- exactly what you were just saying about how you could travel to some of these places just by car -- take that day trip.

Go out there and enjoy the beauty of this country.

Because that's another thing that I'm trying to draw focus to in this book.

I'm walking in Ohio, Indiana.

I'm in Western Pennsylvania.

These are not places that are often seen as like the go-to places.

But my book, which was influenced, of course, by "A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson, Cheryl Strayed's "Wild," but it's also very much influenced by "Blue Highways."

And so that's what I really loved about this journey that I got to make is I got to go see the America that in my mind deserves all the attention.

The people that I met deserved to be interviewed and treated in almost a -- a, um -- a pedestal way, yet at the same time they often feel overlooked.

-So did you -- the tour was all walking.

You did the tour... -No, listen, 50 pages in I realized that writing about walking and reading about walking becomes almost as arduous as walking.

[ Laughter ] And so under the guidance -- remember that very smart woman I mentioned a couple of times already?

My now wife?

She guided me to buying a two-door Jeep that I then was able to drive to certain areas where I then could take long walks.

-But you did the tour mostly -- mostly by yourself?

-Yes.

Yes, absolutely.

-You couldn't persuade anybody else to do this, right?

-No, no.

That is -- you're absolutely right.

There's even a moment where I take a raft -- which by raft I mean a donut about this size that barely fit back here -- uh, tubing down the Allegheny River.

And let me tell you, I invited many friends on that trip, and, weirdly, none of them -- maybe next time, David, I'll reach out to you.

Perhaps you and I could hit the Allegheny.

-Um, well, I don't know if I'd be the best candidate for that, but okay.

So let me ask you, though, when you're doing this, what did you come away with?

What's the most important message you want a reader of your book to come away with?

-That's such a wonderful question.

Thank you.

-What is it?

[ Laughter ] -Beware of isolation.

We are better as a country when we are together.

The opening of this book, the line is, "I've been drinking a bit less and praying a lot more than I used to."

Now I'm not here -- you can -- whatever faith or whatever beliefs that you hold, hold them.

But what I know is that we used to have a church in the center of most of our towns, and once a week we would come together, we would sing, we would give thanks, you would see your neighbor Bob, and Bob's been a bit of a jerk recently, but maybe you see his daughter yelling at him and you think, "Oh, Bob's having a tough time too."

It made us look each other in the eyes and it made us come together.

So be wary of isolation.

We are better when we are together.

If you are struggling in any way, reach out.

I think that something that this country does so well when it does it well, is we come together and we help each other.

We make space for our neighbors.

We care about the people in our lives, and we don't need to draw lines around that.

And I think there is so much overlap in who we are as people and how much we can come together.

And the other side of that story is -- as I said, I study my family through this lens -- um, I've had some family members who suffer from mental illness, who do find themselves isolated, who found this world to become a very dark and scary place.

I understand that.

You can't ignore the difficulties of our history.

You cannot ignore the difficulties of the moment that we are in.

But come together.

Let that motivate you.

Do not wallow and take a path that leads you to a place of being alone.

We are creatures that are meant to be in community with each other.

-But you did this trip alone.

Why did you not take somebody with you?

-Well, but that's -- that's -- listen, that's the thing, that's the thing.

The book is about walking away from loneliness and towards community.

It's the people that put me up.

It's the people that I met along the way, the friendships that I built.

There's a vet out in Fort Wayne.

His name's Dakota.

I'm literally gonna go camping with him in a couple of months.

The connections that I made with these -- with the people that I found were -- it was life-changing.

-Now, let me ask you on -- -[ Applause ] You wrote you wrote two books about tattoos.

Have you written in those books how you can remove a tattoo if you want to remove it?

-[ Laughs ] -No?

-There's wonderful laser technology now.

-You can?

-You absolutely can.

It's gonna be a little pricey, but you can absolutely remove them.

-It doesn't hurt to get them removed?

-Oh, it hurts.

-Oh.

[ Laughter ] And if you had to do it all over again, would you have all those tattoos?

-Let me tell you this -- I am not a proselytizer of tattoos.

I think if -- especially if you're a young kid right now, you're about to have a bunch of older people walking around looking like sailors, and it's not maybe gonna be that cute.

Maybe, like, young people don't like to look like their uncle who's, again, a jalopy covered in bumper stickers.

But I will say for myself, personally, it's been a way of remembering stories.

There's so many people that I care about that are on my body.

-Did Johnny Appleseed have tattoos?

-He does not, but I do -- I did get one -- -You have one?

-Out in Fort Wayne.

Or no -- yes, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Manco Tattoos.

There's a wonderful man out there, and he tattooed a apple with a crown of blossoms, and the stem is on fire.

It's a sacred heart apple, and I love it.

-Okay, well, I'll have to get one of those.

-[ Laughs ] You're not gonna do the Allegheny, but you will -- oh, God.

[ Laughs ] -So you've written another book that I wanted to ask -- you're writing another book -- on Ronald Reagan.

Uh, hasn't Ronald Reagan had enough books written about him?

Why would you want to spend 10 years of your life on -- let's say you're gonna do 10 years -- 10 years of your life on Ronald Reagan?

There was another book by Max Boot that came out recently.

Why does Ronald Reagan -- a very nice person -- need another book?

-[ Laughs ] Well, it is one premise of a historical study that history is part of a conversation and that you do the deep dive, you find new things.

So, you know, Max's book came out last year, I think, and mine will come out in 10 years.

There are all sorts of new records that open up.

There are all sorts of new questions that open up depending on where we are in history.

But for me, Ronald Reagan is, in a funny way, sort of the sequel to J. Edgar Hoover.

One of my great interests as a historian and as a scholar is thinking about the ways -- the debates over Communism and anti-Communism, the Cold War, Red scares, really were the structuring force of the 20th century -- or one of them -- in American politics.

And Hoover was really central to that story, but he died in 1972.

So Reagan then gets me through the 1980s and to the end of the Cold War.

And Reagan, like Hoover, is one of these figures who just has such a long, deep, interesting career that he is not only interesting in his own right, right?

That's what a biography is.

But he is a great vehicle for thinking about all of the forces that created the world that we're in.

-Now, when you write a book, you do 10 years of research on, let's say, J. Edgar Hoover or Ronald Reagan.

Do you do all the research and then you sit down and write, or do you research, write, research, write?

And how frustrating is it when you're doing this?

At some point do you say, "I wish I wasn't doing this"?

[ Laughter ] -I said that many, many times over the course -- it's one of the reasons that I wanted to write the road-trip book.

I wanted to, first of all, show that I can write books much faster than that 10-to-12 year thing.

And it's a whole different method, right?

It's observational.

It's a little bit about me.

It's a little bit of a memoir, this book.

But for these really big, deep-dive historical projects -- in the Hoover book, I actually started with the part of his life that I thought was the most uninteresting, and I saved the parts that I thought were the most interesting to the end so that I would have some motivation to kind of stick with it.

But I wrote it out of order and then came back and sort of stitched it all together.

-Now, when you teach at Yale, do people still say, as they did when I was in college, "Is this gonna be on the exam?"

Do they still ask that?

They ask that.

And how do you know, with artificial intelligence, that people are not cheating?

Because history is a subject where, you know, you're writing, I guess, essays for your exams.

How do you know people aren't cheating?

-Well, it is true that Yale students, maybe in particular, are extremely interested in what's gonna be on the exam.

That's one of the things that they're good at is taking exams.

But I actually have redesigned my classes in the last couple of years around the A.I.

question.

I taught a class in the spring that was called the Un-American Century.

It is the partner class to a class that I teach called the American Century.

They are both histories of the 20th century, but the Un-American Century gets at it through some of those themes that I was just talking about -- Communism, anti-Communism, those kinds of struggles.

But I redesigned that class so that there was a ban on laptops, phones, all other devices in the classroom.

They did a lot of the writing in the classroom as pop quizzes.

So you had to be there and you had to write on the spot.

And then, for historians, it's funny because I think a lot of what we do actually can't be replicated because a lot of the places that we go, the sources we find, the experiences that we have, they are not online.

And so to give students a sense of that, they were all doing an archival research project, so not material that you can just go online and not actually material that's yet been fed into A.I.

-If you had a chance to interview J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan, what one question would you want to ask each of them?

Now, you've studied Hoover for 15 years, really.

What one question would you like to ask him that you couldn't get the answer to from your research?

And while you're not done on Ronald Reagan, what do you think would be the one question you'd want to ask him?

-Well, it's funny.

I mean, I became a historian -- I started life as a journalist and then became a historian in part because I kind of prefer working with people who can't talk back to me.

And so, you know, I think about this.

People are like, "What would you do?"

And I was like, "I don't know if I really want to be in that situation."

But if I were in that situation, I would say they are both famously impenetrable in terms of, you know, their deepest heart's desire, who they -- they're very public men.

They're both very guarded men in various ways.

So I think I would try to get at some of those questions about what their deepest cares and motivations might be.

-You're on "The Today Show" from time to time.

What do you do on "The Today Show"?

-So I'm very lucky in my job.

For over a decade, "The Today Show" has me on about once a season and then maybe for a couple of holidays.

So about, you know, six to eight times.

-Why do they have you on?

What is your specialty?

-I recommend books.

So I read books and I get to go on national television, and I get to recommend the books that I think are the most invigorating or the most interesting.

And it is a wonderful, wonderful way for me to stay connected to the literary world.

-All right, so, leaving aside books written by Beverly Gage... -Right.

I was gonna say.

-...and books written by you -- -You don't have to follow that rule.

-[ Laughs ] -What, if somebody wanted to read a book or two that you've been reading recently, what would you highly recommend other than your book or her book?

-Absolutely.

Can I just say one quick thing on the A.I.

thing, just real quick too, though?

The one thing A.I.

is never going to take away are -- I'm painting with a broad brushstroke here, but they are oftentimes older women who work at historical societies.

And that is what I want to say because I know you agree with me.

The women that make up historical societies in small towns across America, like you were just saying, there is no Internet.

There's nothing that can beat the hands-on archival footage.

And a lot of Chapman -- so Chapman didn't write.

He only proselytized.

He did not write.

So there's not a lot of history to go back and look at his own writings.

That's why I'm fascinated by him, because he is this kind of ever-moving legend, because it's all these oral tales.

But I bring that up to answer your question, which is, a thing that has a lot of writing about it is the Lewis and Clark expedition, and there's over a million words in journals and other entries that you can pore over.

And let me tell you, Craig Fehrman, a historian that's actually here at the festival, did just that.

He did a new retelling of the Lewis and Clark expedition that focused on kind of the soldiers and the people that made up the expedition.

And it also focuses on how it's kind of basically like one of our first NASA projects.

It's one of the first really government-funded, big exploration operations.

But it reads like a novel, and it's fantastic.

It's called "This Vast Enterprise."

Craig Fehrman.

That's the book I'd recommend right now.

Other than yours.

-Okay, well, let's take another one.

-And mine.

-Now, we had the -- one of the -- the astronaut from, uh, the recent astronaut who just went around the moon.

He was here today.

Um, if I was an astronaut, I was gonna go to the moon, and I just wanted to read one book to take with me, just take one book, other than, let's say, the Bible, which is easy to recommend, what one book would you recommend to people, of all the books you've read -- other than her books and your books -- is there one book that you would recommend to an astronaut to take on a journey around the moon?

-Okay, can I cheat?

Can I get two?

-Two.

Go ahead.

-Okay.

Just for a book that I absolutely love is, uh, the collected works of Breece D'J Pancake.

And he's a Virginia writer.

He wrote a lot about West Virginia.

It's a short-story collection.

I just think it's beautiful.

It's the most -- it's probably the book that has affected me the most in my life, because I grew up in a very poor rural situation, and his writing about poor rural situations definitely sparked a fascination that I have with that.

So that would just be my -- if you have not read the collected works of Breece D'J Pancake, it is worth your time.

But to an astronaut, I would say Marcus Aurelius, the book on -- like, his Stoicism, because I think that is something that would be very, very important, uh, for being in a tin can.

I get nervous is all I'm trying to say.

And, um, but -- but I actually have found -- I was -- I switched majors a lot in college, surprising absolutely no one, but I really loved the classics.

And I find that there's so much wealth and knowledge -- you know, don't get me wrong, I love that we're ever moving towards the future.

I love that we're progressing.

I love that we're learning new and new things.

But we had a lot of things figured out back in the day, and it's just nice to have -- the Bible is a great example of that too.

There's a lot of teachings in there that it's really good to just carry around in your heart.

-Okay.

So, um, Beverly, let me ask you.

If I wanted to go on a one-day trip, I got one day to visit a historic site or two, one or two sites, historic sites, and I've got a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old.

Where would you take them?

Williamsburg?

Mount Vernon?

Which ones would be good for children?

Leaving aside the West Coast, because I can't go there in one day.

Where would you go on the East Coast that would educate a child about American history the best, the most?

-Well, as I was saying, I think from D.C.

going to the sites that are in Virginia is just something that I think people here already do but is a really powerful journey.

One of the things that I did in my book was not only go to places that I hadn't seen before, but revisit places that I had gone as a child, and I actually found my scrapbook from my seventh-grade trip to Colonial Williamsburg.

So this is like 1980-something, '84, something like that.

Um, and it was really funny to find it because I'm sure this was a school assignment, but I had also done it incredibly meticulously.

And I had -- apparently was learning calligraphy, and so the front of the scrapbook said "My Williamsburg Scrapbook" in calligraphy.

Uh, and then I had photos of everything that I had seen, and I had typed on a typewriter little captions about everything I had seen.

And then, being who I grew up to be, I saved all of the historic pamphlets from that moment and so was actually able to go back and compare the past and present.

But what that suggests is that, particularly if you were a nerdy little girl like me, but that these trips to places are just incredibly important for children to visit, to experience.

There are things that you remember, even if you don't think that you're going to remember them as you're actually experiencing them.

So I'm a big fan of parents dragging their children out to these places, having an experience together, because I think that's also a piece of going on the road is that -- I love books.

We're here at the National Book Festival.

It's an amazing thing, but books tend to be a little bit solitary, and these are experiences that are usually shared unless you're, you know, a weirdo like me or like Isaac, who's doing all of this by yourself.

My observation from being out on the road is that almost nobody else is out there alone going to all of these places.

-You took your son with you.

How old was he when he was with you on this trip?

-Well, he came on a few of the -- So he was in college while I was doing this.

So he came on the Texas trip.

He had never been there.

There are a few other places that he shows up.

But I did a lot of this with him when he was a kid.

One of our favorite trips, for me at least, was exactly the region of the country that you're talking about.

We took a road trip from the East Coast through Ohio, along the Ohio Presidential Trail, which is surprisingly interesting.

I didn't get a gasp of wonder from the audience here.

Um, but Ohio produced a lot of American presidents in the late 19th and early 20th century -- -And astronauts, -Okay.

And astronauts.

That was a little later, but, uh -- but at any rate, and then the reward was that we ended up in Chicago at Lollapalooza, the music festival.

And so that was a good way to get your teenager to come to, you know, William McKinley's tomb.

-Did you ever get him to say, "When is the trip gonna be over?"

They ever said that?

He never said that?

-You know, he was a good sport and actually an enthusiast in the end.

-Okay, so we have 15 minutes left.

So we're gonna ask people who have questions, just stand up, get a mic -- there should be a mic somewhere -- and go to the mic.

And anybody have any questions, come up here and ask your questions to either of our two authors.

-Real quick, though, can we give it up for David?

Wonderful questions.

-Okay.

Thank you.

Okay.

-[ Applause ] Um, well, look, the compensation for being a moderator is so large that you have to really prepare for this.

That's fine.

Okay.

-Man: I have a question.

I have a question for Isaac.

Have you ever met Dorothy Day?

Uh, she was kind of a Johnny Appleseed journalist.

She tried to start these communes, and she might have been on J. Edgar Hoover's shit list too.

-She definitely was.

-I grew up in a house built by Dorothy.

I mean, not built -- I grew up in the Catholic Worker.

I grew up in Haley House.

I did not meet her.

I did not meet her.

But, like, genuinely, not -- not B.S.ing here, there was a photo of her, JFK, and the pope on my wall growing up.

-Man: She got nominated for sainthood or something like that.

-Yes.

-Man: And there was a spy scientist, Gottlieb, an FBI guy who said he couldn't remember anything.

And Terry Gross, uh, had a good, uh, interview with an author of a book about Gottlieb on "Fresh Air" on NPR.

Did you cover Gottlieb at all?

He was the spy assassin, and he said he couldn't remember anything to the church committee.

-Um, I did not write in great detail about that.

But it's not an uncommon thing that spies say that.

-Okay.

Here.

-Man: Uh, is there a specific person who created the legend of Johnny Appleseed who took, you know, John Chapman and turned him into -- -Yes.

-Man: And why did he do that?

-So the name is in the book, and, I'm sorry, it's not gonna come to me.

I'm very much -- I'm one of these people, without things written down, I don't think I could do what I do.

The way that I write is a lot of voice recording.

But the "Harper's Bazaar" article that I mentioned, the writer of that is mentioned in the book and why I believe he did it was very multifaceted, but we were doing westward expansion at that time, and I believe they were looking for a way to basically take the brutality of what was happening and soften it up a little bit.

And so, in a way, I do think there was a bit of, um, you know, trying to soften the difficult truths that were happening, yet they found a genuinely interesting, caring, kind, soft person.

And so that's the complexity of all this is he became the Mickey Mouse of westward expansion.

I don't know how he would have felt about that, but he himself was genuinely, at most of his life, a good, caring, giving person.

-Okay.

-Woman: Hi.

My question's for Beverly.

As a middle school history teacher, I loved your book.

I really enjoyed the aspects of it and specifically the framework that you had of not just the history at these sites, but the history of how the site has changed over time.

Even the title, "This Land Is Your Land," has its own kind of story, as it was written in response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America."

And I was curious thinking about -- I really want to include your chapter about Upstate New York in my classes here, so I was thinking if that framework has influenced your teaching or if it will, if you'll kind of include some of that lens of thinking about the history of how we've talked about history over time in your American Century or Un-American Century class?

-Yeah, well, I'm so glad to hear that the book is useful, because it really is a book that is written for parents and teachers more than any other audience, and hoping that it's a way to introduce students and younger people to history that is alive and that they can go out and explore for themselves.

So Upstate New York is one of my favorite chapters.

A little bit like Ohio and Indiana, maybe not at the top of everyone's bucket list, but a place where amazing history happened.

And so I'm glad that spoke to you.

It has influenced how I teach.

I redesigned one of my seminars to be kind of place-based, so that we move through the issues of the 20th century by looking at different parts of the country, and the students really seem to connect with that because they're from all over the place, some of them not from the U.S.

at all.

And I also taught -- in the fall, I teamed up with two of my colleagues at Yale, Joanne Freeman, who teaches the American Revolution, and David Blight, who teaches the 19th century, the Civil War.

He wrote a great biography of Frederick Douglass.

And the three of us got together to teach a one-time-only class called America at 250 that we tag-teamed.

But we recorded that so that it's all available on Yale YouTube, and we did a little podcast to go along with it.

So we all had to do each other's assigned readings.

And that also was just an attempt to provide some tools for teachers and for other people.

So if that's of interest, all of that is up there now.

-Okay.

-Man: So first of all, sorry about the shirt, but go Yankees.

-[ Laughs ] -Man: Sorry.

-Um, my question is for Isaac.

Uh, I'm also a teacher.

I teach in a rural setting.

I'm a P.E.

teacher for K-5.

And you talked about the idea of community and you extol the virtues of walking.

What is your advice for how we can distill that down for our next generation, and how can we use it to improve the direction they're going in their physical health, their mental health, all the aspects that tie in to being an educator?

-Yeah, I'm gonna almost say exactly what Beverly said about going to historic sites.

Just grab the kids and do it.

Uh, this is -- the opening of the book is very much about my relationship with my father.

He was a great walker.

Again, we grew up very, very poor.

So he would take me -- our trips, our vacations were just going to live in the woods in the White Mountains, basically.

And he would walk, and he would tell me these elaborate, not very factual stories pulling from American history, but then really putting some juice on it.

But when you're walking as a child, little legs, not as fun.

This giant is walking next to you.

So he would tell me these stories as a way to make sure that I didn't quit.

So I would say if there's some way -- again, the motivation of ending at Lollapalooza -- perfect.

If there's some way to motivate the child to start, because that's the memory I have as a kid.

Whether it was going to a museum, whether it was going for one of these trips or one of these walks, any kind of -- I don't wanna.

But the second I went to the museum or I got to walk with my father, they became kind of my most treasured memories.

And so I just recommend -- it's just about motivating the child to get out, whatever that reward is.

And then once they're out there, you start to feel this is what our bodies were made for.

There is a real beauty of moving through the world at a human pace.

And I mean that not just in the physicality of it.

I mean that in taking things in at a human pace.

And that is a thing that even a child, I think, quickly recognizes.

And I really believe with a little push, with a little motivation, we can reignite a love for the outdoors, a love for adventure.

Go sleep in a tent outside and make them leave the iPad at home.

Or bring the iPad with you, but only give them a certain amount of time on it and make them watch the sunset.

And I truly believe it will -- it's like starting a very small snowball.

It will begin to build.

Walking was not a big part of my life.

My father put it in me as a child, and then I didn't rediscover it until I was 40.

So, yeah.

-Okay.

Here.

-Woman: Hi.

Um, so I'm a person who talks to a lot of people about American history on a regular basis.

That's my job.

And I dispel -- I dispel a lot of myths.

So when I was reading your book, Isaac... -Uh-oh.

-Woman: ...and you said -- you said to live in America is to live inside a legend, I highlighted that 'cause I -- I hear a lot of legend and history and I'm sure -- and Beverly, you start off your book with talking about the bicentennial and all of the things around that.

Um, what is it about legend that's important and what is it about legend that we still struggle with?

-Do you want to take a first swing at it?

-I'll say real quickly that one of the things that I wanted to do in the book was, um, not just dismantle legend but actually engage it, engage these mythic figures.

I think there is a tendency to say we're gonna throw out the old figures and introduce the new ones, but that has given us a very bifurcated historical culture.

And I just think it's much more interesting when you take a character like Thomas Jefferson or a character like Davy Crockett or any of these outsized, kind of mythologized figures and resituate them in the society in which they lived, the actual complexity with which they lived.

But -- But I think the legends can be kind of useful as a way to bring people in and foster that conversation.

So I'm not one for just, you know, being the angry historian in the room who says, "Everything that you think is actually wrong!"

I don't think that's a great strategy for educating.

-Yeah, I absolutely, totally agree.

And I'll just try to keep it quick and just say that, again, my father was a storyteller.

My mother was a pragmatist.

They both had a huge effect on me.

And I write about them in my first book, "Dirtbag, Massachusetts," again, coming-of-age story.

This book, coming-of-middle-age story.

But in that book, in "Dirtbag," I have a line -- How would you feel if everybody took your worst moments and 25 years later put them in a book, your worst decisions?

And I'm talking about my own family there.

And "Rambler," that was -- my mom read the first book, and she was so kind and loving in her reaction to it.

But one of the things she said was, "What about all the camping?

What about all the canoeing trips?"

So "Rambler" is my way of trying to look at my own family history and have a more three-dimensionality to it through looking at everything just Beverly talked about within American history.

And what I will say about legends is you can often still get at the truth.

You can often still get at the truth with a story.

Now, that doesn't mean that facts aren't important.

Facts in history are of the utmost importance, but there is a reason that we as human beings are creatures of storytelling.

And it's something that I will always hold that my father gave me.

So legends forever.

-All right.

We have time for one more question, then we're out of time.

The remaining questioner is right here.

-Man: Um, this is actually for both of you.

Uh, or each of you.

Sorry.

Um, what kinds of books or genres of reading or authors do you maybe have that you love that is sort of a guilty or esoteric pleasure that you think your readers and your fans would be surprised to hear you spend time with?

-Let's not be too graphic, but go ahead.

[ Laughter ] -David!

I can do this very quickly.

Matt Dinniman.

Uh, the "Dungeon Crawler Carl" books.

I get asked all the time by people, "How do I get kids to read?"

Just let them read whatever they want.

Start there.

They'll find James Joyce later.

All right?

Just don't for-- My dad was giving me that.

That's what my dad's reaction to my first book was -- "I shouldn't have given you so much Bukowski to read as a kid."

A true sentence.

But genuinely, Matt Dinniman, I think those "Dungeon Crawler Carl" books are so fun.

They're so engaging.

There is an undertow of emotion in there, and it's actually more complex than it is on its face.

But let people read adventure stories.

Kids love them.

Just let them rip.

-I'm just gonna go with the genre of the beach read, which I -- which I really engage.

I have lots of different ways of relating to reading.

And so I read giant, historical, deep-dive books.

But then I also want to just kind of get lost in a happy narrative sometimes.

And so I do that, too.

-Okay, well, I want to thank Beverly Gage and Isaac Fitzgerald.

Thank you for a very good conversation.

[ Applause ] Okay.

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