Rate My Professor Beverly Gage

Beverly Gage is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale University. She earned a BA in American Studies from Yale University in 1994 and a PhD in History from Columbia University in 2004. Her courses focus on 20th-century U.S. history, with research interests in the Gilded Age and 20th century, political history, government and political development, and ideology and social movements, especially conservatism and radicalism. Gage is the author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, published in 2022, which 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. The book was also named a best book of 2022 by the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Smithsonian. Her earlier book, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror, examines the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing. She writes frequently for journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Gage received the Sarai Ribicoff Award for teaching excellence in Yale College in 2009. In 2015, she was elected 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, she leads the Workshop in Modern U.S. History, a monthly speaker series for faculty and graduate students. She is currently at work on a biography of Ronald Reagan emphasizing debates over communism and the Cold War, and her book This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip through U.S. History is scheduled for publication in April 2026.