Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression by David M. Wrobel

Abstract

 Reviews REVIEWS GLOBAL WEST, AMERICAN FRONTIER: TRAVEL, EMPIRE, AND EXCEPTIONALISM FROM MANIFEST DESTINY TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION by David M. Wrobel University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2013. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 328 pages. $39.95 cloth. The very best historical monographs ask readers to reconsider what they believe to be true about the past and, in the process, require them to re-examine the source materials on which they formed their interpretations.David Wrobel’s latest book does both.Wrobel offers a careful examination of nineteenth- and twentieth -century travel writing to challenge the idea that writers provided homogeneously “exceptionalist visions”of the American West during that period (p. 4).While Wrobel concedes that Americans consumed a “steady diet of exceptionalist rhetoric and imagery,” he also insists that “there was another cultural diet” that he views as “equally voluminous”(p. 4). Indeed, Wrobel demonstrates that travel literature written by both Europeans and Americans over a roughly one-hundred year period, rather than celebrating notions of American exceptionalism or promoting a mythic West, frequently “offered a countercurrent of thinking about the global West during the nineteenth century, and the considerably more frontier-centric and nation-centric envisioning of the West in the twentieth century” (p. 5). Offering a close re-examination of travel literatures, Wrobel shows that this writing could be both deeply perceptive and globally contextualized. The book is organized chronologically and thematically, allowing Wrobel to explore the changing landscapes that travel writers encountered and the ways in which they differently reflected on the West. Chapter 1 demonstrates that nineteenth-century travel writing challenged “the common notion of the American West as an exceptional place, one without parallel” (p. 22). Wrobel shows that travel writers were likely to “place the West in a broader, comparative global context, viewing it as one developing frontier among many.” Moreover, despite historians’ tendency to view travel writers as“architects of imperial visions” and “agents of empire,” at least some writers offered careful — and sometimes critical —considerationof American’sexpansionist impulses (p.21).In this chapter,as in Chapter 2 (which together constitute Part I of the book), Wrobel persuasively demonstrates the ways in which travel writers described a truly “global West.”German writer Friedrich Gerstäcker,for example, envisioned California as a multicultural “global stage” where actors from around the world met and often struggled.His writing thus “put the world into the West.” For Gerst äcker, Wrobel argues, California’s gold rush was not an exclusively western or American story, but, rather, a world story (p. 40–41). Wrobel similarly demonstrates that many nineteenth-century travel writers brought a global sensibility to their accounts.Where British travel writer Isabella Bird began to consider how her experiences in theWest might provide a “defining frame of reference for encounters all across the globe,” Mark Twain joined a “growing chorus” of writers concerned with imperialism (p. 61, 71). These writers were among the many, as Wrobel’s close readings of their texts suggests, who invited readers to both see the “world in the West and the West in the world” (p. 48). The book’s second section considers the twentieth century and demonstrates what Wrobel takes to be an important shift in travel writing.Where many nineteenth-century writers had offered a view of the West within its “broader and largely deexceptionalized global context, their twentieth-century counterparts  OHQ vol. 116, no. 3 often, in contrast, looked persistently inward while searching for a distinctively American frontier, a place like nowhere else on earth” (p. 85). Wrobel places this shift at the precise momentwhenAmericansbeganto perceive the American frontier as closed.Thus,travelers like John Muir, Jack London, and Theodore Roosevelt sought “new frontiers of adventure well beyond the geographic borders of their newly frontierless nation” (p. 86). Where Wrobel argues that London was a culturally sensitive traveller, one who acted more as a “cultural ambassador than as an agent of empire,” he notes the “imperial tone” characteristic of Roosevelt’s writing (p. 91, 99). Yet Wrobel’s keen analysis links Roosevelt’s accounts of his travels in Africa with his earlier writings about theAmericanWest to show how Roosevelt connected these as like “frontiers.” Wrobel also smartly develops...