Great Powers, Holy Powers, and Good Powers: American Protestants Tour the Holy Land, 1867-1914

Abstract

So wrote Mark Twain about the impress of Palestine on his imagination. It is fitting to begin with Twain, for the 1867 trip of the S.S. Quaker City, a trip sponsored by Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Congregational Church and reported by Twain in dispatches to the New York World, inaugurated organized tourism to Palestine. It is not insignificant that the first packaged tour of the Holy Land was conducted by one of America's premier Protestant churches and reported by its greatest author. In the unmistakable voice of Mark Twain comes a truth about Palestine, the “Holy Land” that is central to understanding the views of Protestant Americans who traveled there. During their lives they had got “large impressions” about Palestine that both created expectations about what they would see and structured their interpretations and understandings of what they did see. The fact that Americans would tour Palestine in the period from 1867 to 1914 tells us much about the significance of the Holy Land in the American Protestant mind. In 1867 Palestine was a veritable backwater within the Ottoman Empire. It had little to commend it to travelers except its religious significance. Unlike Greece and Egypt, both of which received far more American visitors, it