ABSTRACT As Norway became an increasingly popular destination in the latter half of the nineteenth century, British travellers turned to guidebooks to structure their travel. Guidebooks to Norway were published in international series by John Murray, Thomas Cook and Baedeker, but also by local travel agents such as Thomas Bennett. Norway seemed to offer an escape from the urban and industrial, yet travellers relied on modern networks of transport and infrastructure. The 1916 guide, Sunlit Norway, was published by the Bergen Steamship Line and the Norwegian State Railways. Visual and textual depictions of infrastructure are prominent and this involvement of transport companies also suggests that the use of certain forms of infrastructure was not simply assumed but actively encouraged. Considering guidebooks as a form of travel writing shows how this travel was fundamentally transnational and highlights the involvement of local people in tourist practices. The presence – or absence – of local people in travel guides provides insight into the impact of tourism on local communities. It also complicates the representations of Norway found in travelogues and travel guides in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reemphasising the modern and alternative ideas of the nation.

ABSTRACT From the 1950s, millions of newly affluent British workers began to holiday abroad for the first time with the majority travelling to Spain. We enjoy no detailed social and cultural history of this transformation which turned Spain into a major site for British social history. But studying this history can help us re-think our understanding of both affluent workers and tourists while enriching Spanish tourism history and British social history. To do this, this article focuses on the life narratives of early British mass tourists and how holidays became linked to their sense of personal development and framed around joy in overcoming fear, benefiting from new opportunities, demonstrating personal adaptability and experiencing personal growth. In this way, it shifts the debate on affluent workers from concerns around income and status to considering how leisure and holidays became linked to consumerism as identity making and the forging of meaning. It also highlights the importance of understanding tourists historically and within their life narratives. This helps shift the Spanish historiography on tourism from the effects of tourism to the tourist experience and opens up a new field of agency and experience to British social history.

ABSTRACT In the late 1920s, the incorporation of Crete into the tourism networks as an archaeological destination served to confirm the island’s orientation towards international markets and its economic, ideological and cultural attachment to European capitalism. From the moment that Crete became a regular cruising stop in the south-eastern Mediterranean, local actors and bodies sought to exert influence over the specific integration of the island into the tourism networks, particularly in light of the relatively limited economic impact of cruise tourism flows. In order to achieve this, they initiated the formulation of a tourism development plan for the island. One of the principal objectives of this plan was to establish a connection between the recreational activities undertaken in the forest and the economic expectations and political aspirations of the local community. Nevertheless, economic considerations and political objectives were insufficient to inform the formulation of a plan for the development of nature tourism. Indeed, the establishment of a tourism plan was a complex social and cultural process, closely tied to the reproduction of social relations on the island and the ways in which local society perceived its relations with European countries and the Greek national state.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the transatlantic exchange of health knowledge and spa town concepts between Central and Western Europe and Saratoga Springs. While spa towns are usually perceived as a European phenomenon of the nineteenth century, this contribution shifts the focus to the role that spa towns played in the United States of America in the early twentieth century, and in particular how the renewal of Saratoga Springs created a new type of spa town for its contemporaries, namely the ‘scientific’ health resort. Based on the unpublished diary of the Medical Director of Saratoga Springs, which he kept during his journey to European spa towns in the early 1930s, I trace which places Walter S. McClellan visited and with whom he met. The diary provides interesting insights not only into how Saratoga Springs was transformed from a typical nineteenth-century spa town to a modern health resort for the masses, but also how a trained medical specialist from the United States observed and perceived European spa development through first-hand experience. I argue that McClellan and others aimed at merging the modernity and progress of European spa towns with the specific democratic profile of Saratoga Springs.

ABSTRACT This article is a case study of a 1927 publication, The Gob’s Guide to Manila, a seventy-four-page book that is a unique efflorescence of the genre, targeting as it did US Navy sailors, rather than more affluent tourists. In attempting to woo sailors the Guide focused not on developing tourist attractions, but rather on the goods and services available in Manila, most especially those related to entertainment. It based its authority not on an abstract projection of expertise, but on a sense of friendship between author and reader. In its style it also adopted a very different approach, predominantly based on the use of humour and poetry, from other guides of the time. In making these choices, it was clearly participating and benefiting from the image of the sailor as a ‘liberty hound’ or ‘jolly tar’ as well as inadvertently strengthening that discourse. The existence of the Gob’s Guide provides further evidence of the military’s role in establishing tourism in the non-European world in the early twentieth century, but it demonstrates that this role was not only as an instrument of ‘pacification’, or developer of infrastructure, as later appropriated by the industry, but extended instead to its members being tourists themselves.

ABSTRACT During fascist rule in Italy (1922–1943), health resorts became key sites where urbanism, architecture, tourism, and biopolitics converged. This article examines how provincial spa towns such as Castrocaro Terme and Fratta Terme were transformed into ideological landscapes under the regime, blending public health, leisure, and regional development. Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of heterotopia and biopolitics, this study situates fascist spa resorts within broader interwar trends of state-managed leisure and health. It argues that health resorts were not merely sites of therapeutic tourism but instruments of social engineering, an attempt to shape class relations, gender roles, and political identities. Through rationalist architecture, ritualised leisure, and symbolic design, these resorts were conceived to inculcate the fascist vision of national rejuvenation, disciplining bodies and, at the same time, promoting the regime’s vision of italianità.

ABSTRACT First staged in 1634, the Oberammergau passion play became a major international tourist attraction in the late nineteenth century. Thomas Cook had a contract with the village by 1880, and by 1900 each season drew nearly a quarter of a million spectators from Europe, North America, and beyond. Oberammergau’s commercial success was potentially self-destructive because the passion play’s credibility depended on the villagers’ behaviour: they could be either a selfless Catholic community performing through religious devotion or a sealed vessel of German folk culture preserving their tradition, but not self-interested economic actors. This tension intensified at the fin de siècle and threatened to explode when Oberammergau staged a season in 1922 during the German economic crisis. Drawing on village and state archives, travellers’ accounts, and press representations, this article tracks the strategies that the Oberammergauers used to modernise for the tourist economy while attempting to sustain an aura of selfless morality.