Global West, American frontier : travel, empire, and exceptionalism from manifest destiny to the Great Depression /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Wrobel, David M., author.
Imprint:	Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 2013.
Description:	xv, 312 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Language:	English
Series:	Calvin P. Horn lectures in Western history and culture Calvin P. Horn lectures in Western history and culture.
Subject:	Travel writing -- Historiography. Historiography. Public opinion. Travel. West (U.S.) -- Description and travel -- History. West (U.S.) -- Historiography. West (U.S.) -- Public opinion. United States, West.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/9349869

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780826353702 (hardback) 0826353703 (hardback) 9780826353719 (electronic)
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:	"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 counternarrative 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, 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 there was such a discipline as anthropology. In recent decades travel writers have not received much respect in the academy, but Wrobel rescues this lively genre, demonstrating that travel writers offered an understanding of the West considerably more complex than the notion of the mythic West promoted to support Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century and American exceptionalism in the twentieth"--Provided by publisher. "This book examines how travel writers viewed the American West from the age of Manifest Destiny through the Great Depression. In the nineteenth century, the West was often presented as one developing frontier among many; in the twentieth century, travel writers often searched for American frontier distinctiveness"--Provided by publisher"--Provided by publisher.

Table of Contents:

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Roads Traveled
Beyond the Mythic West
Roads Traveled and Not Traveled
Part 1. The Global West of the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 1. Exceptionalism and Globalism: Revisiting the Traveler
Exceptionalism and Empire
Resituating the Traveler
In Europe and Around the World
Chapter 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 2. The American Frontier of the Twentieth Century
Chapter 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
Chapter 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
Chapter 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

Global West, American frontier : travel, empire, and exceptionalism from manifest destiny to the Great Depression /

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