American Travel Revisited

Abstract

These three recent studies of American travel writing, all focusing mainly on the nineteenth century, share an emphasis on what is particularly American-as opposed to British or European-about the travelers and their perceptions. Each book questions how nineteenth-century American travelers compare to their Old World counterparts, how Americans projected their national biases and perspectives onto foreign lands and cultures, and how the experience of travel helped change the writers' sense of themselves as Americans, distinct from Europeans. Bruce Harvey limits his analysis to antebellum writing in American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865 (2001), but he includes unusual kinds of literature, from early American geography textbooks to treatises on the resettlement of African Americans in