A travel-worthy nation : travel, cultural liminality, and national consciousness in the United States, 1783-1848
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This project contends that the distinct American national identity is rooted in the early travel phenomenon, an effect of the United States's postcolonial cultural dependence. As early as 1787, elite Americans identified the importance of cultural authority to political independence in the transatlantic world. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century Anglo-European culture evidenced that travel strengthened national legitimacy by displaying cultural distinction and unification. Thus, Americans sought to establish the United States as a travel-worthy country amidst other diplomatic, economic, and political developments. After American independence, British travelers visited the United States scouting for emigration because they perceived it as still within the imperial periphery. Independent Americans' economic dependence on the British Empire reinforced this notion and also enabled them to continue importing British culture as an early domestically unifying tool and transatlantic display of belonging. Further, the population's recent status as British subjects and predominantly Anglo ancestry comprised a familiar society for travelers, albeit under distinct political rule. British travelers initially found Americans familiar and used European comparisons to familiarize the United States as a country, while Americans embraced their travel literature as evidence of legitimacy and sources of information. At the turn of the century, geopolitical circumstances forced a renegotiation of the Anglo- American dynamic. Political and social unrest caused war in Europe, which led Britain to capitalize on American dependency and similarity for military support. British travel narratives added to outrage over the British Navy's impressment and American newspaper editors publicized the travelers' commentary as harmful to the United States's reputation. As such, they identified what the British got wrong about Americans but had little to offer in corrections because the national self-image rested on intangible political values. The War of 1812 then instigated a combination of developments ripe for claiming cultural authority in pursuit of a distinction. Reduced British presence in North America encouraged federal tours in the west in order to produce trustworthy--not British-- information, while postwar nationalism decidedly othered the British as opponents of republican government. Still, Americans fresh from a second war for independence had only their shared government and political abstractions to rally around. Newspapers, still suspicious of British travelers' influence, turned travel literature into a transatlantic discourse about the American identity, which included national space. Like the federal government's support for western tours, editors and contributors called upon Americans to travel their own country instead of relying on British information. The itinerary of the first American travel guide, published in 1821, consisted of northeastern sites. The region's picturesque scenery and existing attractions, like Niagara Falls and Ballston Springs, and developing urban spaces constituted a tour of American distinction and progress that Anglo- Europeans would still find comprehensible. The communication, market, and transportation revolutions expanded the possibilities of domestic travel, while westward expansion emphasized tensions around what domesticating new national space meant in such a geographically diverse country. The American self-image firmly rested on natural grandeur and progress but now had to consider how to effectively apply it across the expanding country. By the 1830s, a domestic American travel institution flourished. Publishers released new editions of guidebooks with updated sites and information, more Americans had the resources to travel, and there was more country to experience. Battle sites, waterfalls, native American encampments, caves, natural springs, asylums, and penitentiaries were among sites that travelers and guides made symbolic of America. However, growing sectional tensions manifested in domestic travel discourse. The northeast region inspired the national landscape and while southern states embraced the template in this period, they struggled to attract travelers and considered the issue within the broader sectional dynamic. Further, bringing new western states and territories into the nation maintained an eastern-western dichotomy as the northern-southern polarity grew. Despite this, American tourists abroad performed a unified national identity based on landscape to understand other spaces, as well as to avoid revealing their relation to slavery amongst European hosts. By the close of the 1840s, Americans possessed a concrete self-image and a fragile, though necessary national identity. A surge in European emigration, more territorial acquisitions, and intensifying debates about the future of slavery only added pressure. This project seeks to establish that postcolonial Americans recognized that Anglo-European national legitimacy required cultural distinction, and that travel was the means to achieve it. In order to become a travel-worthy nation, Americans had to also establish what distinguished their national space and represented them.
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Ph. D.