Introduction : New worlds and old lands : the travel book and the construction of American identity / Judith Hamera and Alfred Bendixen -- Beginnings : the origins of American travel writing in the pre-revolutionary period / Philip Gould -- "Property in the horizon" : landscape and American travel writing / William W. Stowe -- New York to Niagara by way of the Hudson and the Erie / Christopher Mulvey -- The Mississippi river as site and symbol / Thomas Ruys Smith -- The Southwest and travel writing / Martin Padget -- American travel books about Europe before the Civil War / Alfred Bendixen -- Americans in Europe : Henry James to the present / William Merrill Decker -- Americans in the Holy Land, Israel, and Palestine / Hilton Obenzinger -- Americans in the larger world : beyond the Pacific coast / Christopher McBride -- South of the border : American travel writing in Latin America / Terry Caesar -- African American travel literature / Virginia Whatley Smith -- American women and travel writing / Susan L. Roberson -- Driving that highway to consciousness : late twentieth-century American travel literature / Deborah Paes de Barros
Summary
Travel writing has always been intimately linked with the construction of American identity. These essays trace the journeys taken by writers from the pre-revolutionary period right up to the present. They examine a range of responses to the problems posed by landscapes found both at home and abroad
