Tourism and the Market Revolution

Abstract

The nearly simultaneous publication of these three books on nineteenthcentury mineral springs resorts marks the maturation of the history of tourism and its inclusion in the mainstream of historical studies. For years the study of tourism stood outside traditional historiography, regarded as a subject for sociology or cultural studies. Even the most important works to emerge over the past decade or so, including John Sears' Sacred Places (1989), Dona Brown's Inventing New England (1995), and Cindy Aron's Working at Play (1999), addressed broader issues such as tourism's cultural importance, its commercial development, or the concept of leisure in American life. The appearance of Orvar Lofgren's theoretical work, On Holiday (1999), and the reissue of Dean MacCannell's classic sociological study, The Tourist (1976; reprint, 1999), might lead some readers to assume that theory and the most general questions about tourism's historical significance were again dominating the subfield. But Charlene Lewis, Jon Sterngass, and Theodore Corbett have used the archetypal method of social history, the case study, to remind historians of nineteenth-century America that tourism and leisure were central to American culture and society. The resorts that these historians study both created and responded to the major changes of nineteenth-century America: the Market Revolution, the process of class formation, the commercialization of leisure time, and the construction of regional identities. What some scholars might see as the esoteric diversions of a dissipated leisure class