Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression

Description

This thoughtful examination of a century of travel writing about the American West overturns a variety of popular and academic stereotypes. Looking at both European and American travelers' accounts of the West, from de Tocqueville's Democracy in America to William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, David Wrobel offers a counter narrative to the nation's romantic entanglement with its western past and suggests the importance of some long-overlooked authors, lively and perceptive witnesses to our history who deserve new attention. Prior to the professionalization of academic disciplines, the reading public gained much of its knowledge about the world from travel writing. Travel writers found a wide and respectful audience for their reports on history, geography, and the natural world, in addition to reporting on aboriginal cultures before the advent of anthropology as a discipline. Although in recent decades western historians have paid little attention to travel writing, Wrobel demonstrates that this genre in fact offers an important and rich understanding of the American West--one that extends and complicates a simple reading of the West that promotes the notions of Manifest Destiny or American exceptionalism. Wrobel finds counterpoints to the mythic West of the nineteenth century in such varied accounts as George Catlin's Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium (1852), Richard Francis Burton's The City of the Saints (1861), and Mark Twain's Following the Equator (1897), reminders of the messy and contradictory world that people navigated in the past much as they do in the present. His book is a testament to the instructive ways in which the best travel writers have represented the West. Front Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Inroduction: Roads Traveled Beyond the Mythic West Roads Traveled and Not Traveled PART ONE: The Global West of the Nineteenth Century 1: Exceptionalism and Globalism: Revisiting the Traveler Exceptionalism and Empire Resituating the Traveler In Europe and Around the World 2: The World in the West, The West in the World: Travels in the Age of Empire From the African Continent to the Mormon Kingdom From the Western Rockies to the Near and Far East Across the Plains, Around the World, and Back to Africa PART TWO: The American Frontier of the Twentieth Century 3: "No, Adventure is Not Dead": Frontier Journeys in the Last Great Age of Exploration Global Frontiers From Hawaii to Africa On the River of Doubt Coda: In Asia 4: The End of the West?: Automotive Frontiers of the Early Twentieth Century The Pioneering Strain The Great Race and the Acids of Materialism The Acids of Modernity Of Tourists and Travel Writers 5: Rediscovering the West: Regional Guides in the Depression Years The Promise of the West Portrait of a Nation and a Region Tour 1: California Coast to the Lone Star State Tour 2: Southern Plains to the Northern Border Tour 3: Rocky Mountains and Great Basin Tour 4: Pacific Northwest to the Last Frontier Coda: Returning to Native Grounds Conclusion: Enduring Roads Premature Endings: The Presumed Death of the Travel Book Enduring Western Roads Legacies of the Global West and the American Frontier Notes Selected Bibliography Index Back Cover