20 - Mobilities: Travel, Expatriation, and Tourism

Summary

Three best-selling travel narratives – Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years before the Mast, William Wells Brown’s The American Fugitive in Europe, and Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad – provide the perfect signposts to a history of American engagement with the wider world during the nineteenth century. The first was published in 1840, the second in 1855, and the third in 1869. But while separated by the distance of only a few short years, each described wildly different realities. The intervening decades produced a critical shift in the country’s presence overseas, and when juxtaposed, the three authors help to embody and sharpen the contours of this transformation. This was, ultimately, a revolution in both mobility and modality; Americans dramatically revised how they moved through the world and the tropes through which they elected to describe their experiences overseas narratively.