Travel In Central America Research Articles

Apologetics and Antiquity: Book of Mormon Reception, 1830–1844

Apologetics and Antiquity: Book of Mormon Reception, 1830–1844

Seeing the Maya in the American Parlor: Illustrations as a Parallel Text in John Lloyd Stephens' Incidents of Travel in Central America (1841)

Seeing the Maya in the American Parlor: Illustrations as a Parallel Text in John Lloyd Stephens' <i>Incidents of Travel in Central America</i> (1841)

Joseph Smith, the Times and Seasons, and Central American Ruins

During the time the Latter-day Saints lived in Nauvoo, John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood published Incidents of Travel in Central America, an illustrated report of the first discovery of ancient ruins in Central America by explorers. These discoveries caused great excitement among the Saints, and subsequently five editorials appeared in the Times and Seasons commenting on what these meant for the church. Although the author of the editorials was not indicated, historians have wondered if Joseph Smith penned them since he was the newspaper’s editor at the time. We examined the historical evidence surrounding the editorials and conducted a detailed stylometric analysis of the texts, comparing the writing style in the editorials with the writing styles of Joseph Smith, John Taylor, and Wilford Woodruff—the only men involved with the newspaper during the time the editorials were published. Both the historical and stylometric evidence point toward Joseph Smith as the most likely author of the editorials. Even if he did not write them alone, he took full responsibility for the contents of the newspaper during his editorial tenure when he stated, “I alone stand for it.”

Introduction: Travelling Texts in Spain and Spanish America

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] The author is grateful to all the contributors to this special issue for their patience during the process of its development and to the following people for their support and guidance in terms of both the conference project and in the production of this issue: Catherine Davies, Graham Huggan, Bart Moore-Gilbert, David Murphy, Terry O'Reilly, Philip Swanson, and Jason Wilson. [2] See also Beardsell (2000 Beardsell, P. 2000. Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze, Manchester: Manchester University Press. [Google Scholar], pp. 20–39). [3] Indeed, Michel de Certeau (1990 De Certeau, M. 1990 [1980]. L'invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire, Paris: Gallimard. [Google Scholar], p. 206) has declared that every narrative is a travel narrative. [4] For example, Columbus's journals have inspired a plethora of debate, in works such as Henige (1991 Henige, D. 1991. In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. [Google Scholar]), Greenblatt (1991 Greenblatt, S. 1991. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Oxford: Clarendon Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), and Zamora (1993 Zamora, M. 1993. Reading Columbus, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). For just some examples of the writing of other colonial and post-independence travellers in Latin America, see Leonard (1972 Leonard, I. A. 1972. Colonial Travellers in Latin America, New York: Knopf. [Google Scholar]) and Stephens (1842 Stephens, J. 1842. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, London: J. Murray. [Google Scholar]). [5] See also, on the same period and travellers, Mejía Pérez (2004 Mejía Pérez, A. 2004. A Geography of Hard Times: Narrative about Travel to South America, 1780–1849, New York: State University of New York Press. [Google Scholar]). [6] For an anthology of travel writing in Spain/by Spanish travellers, see Gómez Mendoza (1988 Gómez Mendoza, J. 1988. Viajeros y paisajes, Madrid: Alianza. [Google Scholar]). There are critical essays on Spanish travellers/travel writers in Burdett and Duncan (2002 Burdett, C. and Duncan, D., eds. 2002. Cultural Encounters: European Travel Writing in the 1930s, London and New York: Berghahn. [Google Scholar]) and David Henn has written extensively on travel writing in Spain, especially on the travel writing of Camilo José Cela and Emilia Pardo Bazán, mostly recently in Henn (2004 Henn, D. 2004. Old Spain and New Spain: The Travel Narratives of Camilo José Cela, Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. [Google Scholar]). For an overview of travel writing in/on Latin America, see Wilson (1987 Wilson, J. 1987. “Travel Literature”. In Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, Edited by: Smith, Verity. 803Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. [Google Scholar]); see Tavera Alfaro (1984 Tavera Alfaro, J., ed. 1984. Viajes en Mexico: crónicas mexicanas, Vol. I, Mexico: FCE. [Google Scholar]) for an anthology of travel writings on Mexico and Zamudio (2004 Zamudio, L. E., ed. 2004. Espacio, viajes y viajeros, Mexico: Aldus/Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana - Iztapalapa. [Google Scholar]) for recent critical approaches to travel writing in/on that country. See Lindsay and Youngs (2003 Lindsay, C. and Youngs, T., eds. 2003. Studies in Travel Writing vol. 7, no. 1 (Latin American Travel Writing) [Google Scholar]) for critical essays on Latin American travel writing.

On the trail of the Maya explorer: tracing the epic journey of John Lloyd Stephens

A Mesoamerican travel book from two perspectives and two centuries.In 1839 John Lloyd Stephens, then 31 years old, and his traveling companion, artist Frederick Catherwood, disappeared into the vast rain forest of eastern Guatemala. They had heard rumors that remains of a civilization of incomparable artistic and cultural merit were moldering in the steamy lowland jungles. They braved Indian uprisings, road agents, heat, and biting insects to eventually encounter what is today known as the lost civilization of the Maya.In 1841 Stephens published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan to instant acclaim with both American and international audiences. His conversational style was fresh and crisp and his subject matter, the search for lost cities on the Central American isthmus, was romantic and adventurous. Stephens's book has been characterized as the great American nonfiction narrative of the 19th century. Indeed, what Stephens wrote about the Maya makes a major contribution to Maya studies.Steve Glassman retraces Stephens's route, visiting the same archaeological sites, towns, markets, and churches and meeting along the way the descendants of those people Stephens described, from mestizo en route to the cornfields to town elders welcoming the Norte Americanos. Glassman's work interlaces discussion of the history, natural environment, and architecture of the region with descriptions of the people who live and work there. Glassman compares his 20th-century experience with Stephens's 19th-century exploration, gazing in awe at the same monumental pyramids, eating similar foods, and avoiding the political clashes that disrupt the governments and economies of the area.Stephens's books are still widely available, but his importance to literary professionals has been overlooked. With this new travelogue, Glassman reaffirms Stephens's reputation and brings his work to wider critical and public attention.

Culture on Vacation

Culture on Vacation Mark Goble (bio) James Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Why is it not surprising that the Oxford English Dictionary locates the word “vacationer” as a term used chiefly in the United States? Across the whole complicated spectrum of U.S. cultures, classes, and ethnic identities, it can be said that practically no one “goes on holiday” and only rarely does someone “travel.” Instead, Americans take vacations. The very locution suggests the intensity with which leisure is pursued and constructed in the U.S., the almost violent attachment to small bits of time away from everyday life here in the industrialized nation that keeps its workers at work—across the class structure—for more hours of more weeks than all but a few Pacific Rim nations, which are then of course demonized for making their workers work too hard. At frequent stops along the various ways through modernity that James Clifford charts in his latest book, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, he makes use of his own location as the American “vacationer” to orient himself and us within the many cultures-in-transit with which he is concerned. This is not to say that orientation, once achieved, is readily understood or long maintained. One of the particular strengths of Clifford’s work as “a historical critic of anthropology” (8), whether in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, a collection of essays he edited with George Marcus, or his previous book, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, has always been its willingness to dispense with rigid conclusions in favor of a dialectical flexibility across a heterogeneous landscape that excludes total purity of either theoretical abstraction or empirical experience. Routes extends and amplifies Clifford’s familiar style of analysis, though sometimes departing from his established topics of interest. “Routes continues an argument with the concept of culture” (2), Clifford writes, but this argument is often carried out on a terrain in which academic argument itself is on a sort of vacation, purposefully avoided in hopes of radically re-creating some of the standard styles of writing in which the study of “culture” is done. As Clifford writes, “Experiments in travel writing and poetic collage are interspersed with formal essays. By combining genres I register, and begin to historicize, the book’s composition—its different audiences and occasions. The point is not to bypass academic rigor.... The book’s mix of styles evokes these multiple and uneven practices of research, making visible the borders of academic work” (12). Routes gives one the sense of critique carried out under conditions of compulsory movement from place to place and from discourse to discourse. And like an American vacation in the strict sense of the term, different historical sites are visited both literally and figuratively. Each of the book’s three sections is loosely organized around standard essays. “Traveling Cultures” and “Spatial Practices” set the terms for the book’s first section, “Travels”; “Museums as Contact Zones” serves as the critical mass for several pieces on “Contacts”; and “Diasporas” outlines what is at stake in the various “Futures” that Clifford investigates in the book’s third and final portion. These “formal essays” inform and contend with other texts that range in styles among the various aforementioned genres. There are several pieces of travel writing that visit such locations as the northwest coast of Canada, the Museum of Man in London, the bustling tourist center of Palenque, Mexico, and Fort Ross, California. And in the practice of “poetic collage,” Clifford visits such texts as John Wesley Powell’s The Exploration of the Colorado River and John Steven’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, both works of nineteenth century U.S. travel writing; Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of my Name; and Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. The diversity of approaches and appropriations is in keeping with Clifford’s conception of the book’s deceptively plain yet formidable goal: “Routes begins with [the] assumption of movement, arguing that travels and contacts are crucial sites for an unfinished modernity.... The essays...

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan

Stevens and Stephens: A Possible Source

S UBSTANTIVE correspondences appear to exist between three of Wallace Stevens' poems and a work of travel-literature which he is known to have possessed: John L(loyd) Stephens' Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, i84I-43).' three poems are: The Worms at Heaven's Gate (I9I6), The Comedian as the Letter C (I92I-22), and poem III (A lasting visage in a lasting bush) of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction: It Must Give Pleasure (1942). In the earliest of the three Stevens poems the disentombment of Badroulbadour proceeds as follows:

Frederick Catherwood: Engravings and Lithographs from the Mayan Drawings

When the titles Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan or Incidents of Travel in Yucatan are mentioned, John L. Stephens, the author, is usually recalled, but the name of Frederick Catherwood, the artist whose illustrations add a significant visual di­ mension to these volumes, is frequently overlooked. John Lloyd Ste­ phens was a successful New York lawyer and already a popular au­ thor before he journeyed to the Yucatan Peninsula. In 1837 he had published an account of his travels in Arabia, and the next year he followed this with his Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia and Poland. Between 1839 and 1842 he and Frederick Catherwood made three expeditions to Yucatan, Chiapas, Quintana Roo and Gua­ temala. The two books which Stephens wrote based on these expe­ riences quickly became best sellers, although the price of five dollars was then remarkably high for each two-volume set. The two volumes of Incidents of Travel in Central America were published in 1841 by Harper & Brothers and included 77 engravings, while the two volumes of Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1843, by the same publisher, were illustrated with 120 new engravings based on the careful drawings of Frederick Catherwood. These books “describe . . . the most extensive journey ever made by a stranger in that peninsula and contain the accounts of visits to forty-four ruined cities, or places in which the remains or vestiges of ancient population were found.”1 These were remarkable publications, even though travel books de­ scribing exotic lands were popular during the mid-nineteenth century. Capitan del Rio had written an account of his explorations of the ancient Mayan city of Palenque on the edge of the rain forests of

The Influence of Travel Books on Early American Hispanism

Students of the famous first contingent of Yankee Hispanists and of North American literature in general, during the national and revolutionary periods, are prone to overlook the pronounced influence of British, American, and French travel books about Spain and Spanish America. The popularity which travel accounts enjoyed in the nineteenth century is attested by a well-known publisher’s observation to the distinguished pioneer explorer of Central America, John L. Stephens, author of the recently reprinted Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas &amp; Yucatan (1841, 1949). On the latter’s query as to what forms of literature Harper Brothers favored, Harper is said to have replied: “Travels sell about the best of anything we get hold of. They don’t always go with a rush, like a novel by a celebrated author, but they sell longer, and in the end, pay better.”

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán. By John L. Stephens and Richard L. Predmore.

<i>Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán</i>. By John L. Stephens and Richard L. Predmore.

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán by John L. Stephens, Esq

Book Review| July 01 1950 Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán by John L. Stephens, Esq Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán. By Esq Stephens, John L.. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Predmore, Richard L.. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949. 2 vols. Pp. xx, 346, and xiv, 401. $10.00.. Alan K. Manchester Alan K. Manchester Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1950) 49 (3): 420–421. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-49-3-420 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Alan K. Manchester; Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán by John L. Stephens, Esq. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 1950; 49 (3): 420–421. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-49-3-420 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1950 by Duke University Press1950 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan.

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan.

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán

John Lloyd Stephens (1805–1852) was an American politician, explorer and writer who is renowned for his pioneering research into the ancient Maya civilisation of Central America. In 1839 Stephens was appointed a Special Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Central America (modern Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador). First published in 1841, this two-volume work is an account of his travels in 1839 and 1840, visiting and recording ancient Mayan sites. Stephens describes Copan, Palenque and forty-two other ancient sites and includes over fifty illustrations drawn by his travelling companion Frederick Catherwood (1799–1854), a professional architect. Although earlier accounts of Mayan ruins had been published, Stephens' vivid descriptions and Catherwood's meticulous drawings were far more detailed and accurate than previous reports, and kindled Victorian interest in the ancient Maya civilisation. Volume 2 focuses on Palenque, Uxmal and other Mayan sites.

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan

STEPHENS, JOHN L. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, &amp; Yucatan. Edited with an introduction &amp; notes by Richard L. Predmore. Two vols. Vol. I, pp. xx, 346; Vol. II, pp. xiv, 401. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949. $10.00

STEPHENS, JOHN L. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, &amp; Yucatan. Edited with an introduction &amp; notes by Richard L. Predmore. Two vols. Vol. I, pp. xx, 346; Vol. II, pp. xiv, 401. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949. $10.00

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, &amp; Yucatan

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, &amp; Yucatan

John Lloyd Stephens and His American Book

John Lloyd Stephens was a remarkable man in his day and probably would have been remarkable at any time in American history. Lawyer, politician, traveler, author, diplomat and entrepreneur, he made his contribution to American life. Because of the heritage which he left, now as the centenary of his death approaches, the presses of two leading American universities have enriched their list of titles with books relating to Stephens. Rutgers University Press, located in Stephens’ native state, has brought out a new edition of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, &amp;amp; Yucatan (New Brunswick, 1949. 2 vols., Pp. xx, 346; xiv, 340. Illus., map.) under the able editorship of Richard L. Predmore. In the West, the University of Oklahoma Press has offered to the reading public Maya Explorer: John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Cities of Central America and Yucatan (Norman, 1948. Pp. xviii, 324., illus.), a delightful biography by Victor Wolfgang von Hagen.

John Lloyd Stephens and His American Book

John Lloyd Stephens was a remarkable man in his day and probably would have been remarkable at any time in American history. Lawyer, politician, traveler, author, diplomat and entrepreneur, he made his contribution to American life. Because of the heritage which he left, now as the centenary of his death approaches, the presses of two leading American universities have enriched their list of titles with books relating to Stephens. Rutgers University Press, located in Stephens’ native state, has brought out a new edition of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, &amp; Yucatan (New Brunswick, 1949. 2 vols., Pp. xx, 346; xiv, 340. Illus., map.) under the able editorship of Richard L. Predmore. In the West, the University of Oklahoma Press has offered to the reading public Maya Explorer: John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Cities of Central America and Yucatan (Norman, 1948. Pp. xviii, 324., illus.), a delightful biography by Victor Wolfgang von Hagen.