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Beverly Gage ’94 is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale University, where she teaches 20th-century American history. Her book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Bancroft Prize in American History, 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. It was also named one of the best books of 2022 by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Smithsonian Magazine.
Professor Gage’s first book, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror, examined the violent frustrations surrounding industrial capitalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exemplified by the 1920 Wall Street bombing. At Yale, Professor Gage was the co-chair of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education, assembled by Yale President Maurie McInnis to recommend ways the university can respond to declining public trust in higher education. In April 2026, Gage published her latest book, This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History. The book begins at historic sites connected to the American Revolution in Philadelphia and moves through time, ending at Disneyland, while connecting readers to the 250 years of U.S. history since the Declaration of Independence was signed.
Beverly Gage accepts the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography from Columbia University President Emeritus Lee Bollinger.
Before becoming one of the most influential academics in higher education, Professor Gage initially planned to study classical music as an undergraduate. Her academic focus shifted because of experiences working at a ranch in Montana, teaching at a women’s prison in Connecticut, and conducting research in the archives of Beinecke and Sterling Libraries. “I learned as much from being in New Haven as I learned from being in the Yale classroom,” Gage explained. “Sometimes a place like Yale can get quite insular…thinking about the communities you’re embedded in is really important for understanding your own assumptions and finding where your work fits into the world,” Professor Gage said.
A ranch in Montana is not the most obvious place for a classical musician to begin shifting her academic focus to American history, yet it was for Gage. “The summer after sophomore year, I wanted to see more of the country, so I got a brochure of every dude ranch in the state of Montana and wrote to them,” she explained. She spent three months working at a ranch, cleaning cabins, serving food to guests, and hiking in her spare time. Exploring the natural beauty of the United States sparked her interest in the history of the places she encountered. “It was the beginning of this exploration of the country that I’ve been engaged in ever since,” Gage shared.
After her time in Montana, it was in New Haven as much as at Yale that Professor Gage began developing the skills and academic interests that brought her to the highest levels of academia. “I was very interested, at the time, in the history of prisons and the rise of mass incarceration,” Professor Gage explained. “One research project that I did was on the Attica Prison Riot in the early 1970s, when prisoners inside the state prison system staged an uprising that led to a violent standoff with police. It was the first project that took me into the archival resources at Beinecke and Sterling Libraries, and I found that I really loved doing archival research,” Gage said.
Beyond the library, Professor Gage’s first teaching experience came as a Dwight Hall Summer Fellow. As a Dwight Hall Summer Fellow, Gage taught GED classes in the Newhallville neighborhood of New Haven. “I spent the mornings teaching and the afternoons preparing lessons,” she recalled. During her senior year at Yale, she also taught writing once a week at York Correctional Institution, an experience that became a core part of her undergraduate education. Reflecting on both experiences, Gage said they helped her connect with the New Haven community in a way that made her feel like a member of it rather than simply a student passing through.
Gage later earned her PhD from Columbia University, writing her dissertation on the history of the 1920 Wall Street bombing. “It took me into a world of really violent conflict over industrial capitalism, finance, and labor conditions,” she said. This historical episode became the subject of her first book, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror. Gage recalled that the topic felt especially relevant because, when she began researching it, the Cold War had recently ended and celebrations of Wall Street and capitalism often overshadowed the social struggles reflected in the bombing. For this work, she received the Bancroft Dissertation Award, her first major academic writing prize. “I had the unusual experience of coming straight from graduate school to become a faculty member at Yale. I was excited, but I also had a little imposter syndrome. Getting the dissertation award was a sort of affirmation,” Gage shared.
Near the end of graduate school, as she began her new position at Yale, Gage also became a mother and worked to balance the many responsibilities in her life. “Autonomy and independence are the great parts of being a professor,” she said, reflecting on how academic life allowed her to manage her own schedule as a parent. Although those years brought significant pressure, Gage remembers them fondly. “It was hard to do everything at once, but it is possible,” she said.
Beverly Gage’s commitment to excellent scholarship has become particularly important as the United States faces increasing polarization and social tension. At Yale, she advises the university’s administration on how to rebuild public trust at a time when confidence in higher education is at historic lows. As a historian of the United States, Gage offers a nuanced perspective on how Americans should approach the nation’s past, an issue central to civic identity. “There are really two trends, neither of which I think gets it right,” Gage explained. “One is claiming that if you love your country and you’re patriotic, you can only say great things about it. The other is to retreat and say that the country is hopeless.” She continued, “My book tries to tell a different story that leans into the tension between those two positions and finds a way to mark a moment like the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence without turning away from some of the most difficult parts of the past.”
This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History – Published April 2026
Professor Gage’s commitment to shape her own scholarship and Yale as an institution to serve the broader community exemplifies Dwight Hall’s Grow pillar of Dwight Hall’s Engage, Grow, and Advance program delivery model, striving to develop students’ intellectual, as well as moral and civic awareness. Like Professor Gage, Yale’s students are educated to contribute to communities whether through volunteering, advocating for policy changes in their institutions, or using their careers to serve their community. Dwight Hall enables that vital civic and moral piece for a holistic education.
*Note: Interview quotes were edited for length and clarity.
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