Beverly Gage

Beverly Gage is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History. Her courses focus on 20th-century U.S. history.

 

Her new book, This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip through U.S. History, will be published by Simon & Schuster in April 2026. The book offers an on-the-road, behind-the-steering-wheel retelling of 250 years of U.S. history, starting at Philadelphia’s Revolution-era historic sites and ending at Disneyland in the 20th-century California dream. On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it makes the case for exploring–and reckoning with–all 250 years of American national history. It also has some fun along the way.

 

She is currently at work on a biography of Ronald Reagan, with an emphasis on the ways that debates over communism and the Cold War shaped his life and politics.

 

Her book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, a biography of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography, the Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History, and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians. G-Man was named a best book of 2022 by the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Smithsonian. 

 

Professor Gage is also the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror, which examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing. In addition to her teaching and research, she writes for numerous journals and magazines, including The New Yorker, New York Times, and Washington Post.  

  

In 2009, Professor Gage received the Sarai Ribicoff Award for teaching excellence in Yale College. In 2015, she was elected to serve as the first chair of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate. From 2017 to 2021, she served as director of Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy.

  

With Professor Elizabeth Hinton, Professor Gage leads the Workshop in Modern U.S. History, a monthly speaker series for faculty and graduate students to discuss the latest scholarship in 20th-century U.S. history. 

 

Professor Gage is a graduate of Yale University (1994, BA, American Studies) and Columbia University (2004, PhD, History).