1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910824896803321

Autore

Wrobel David M

Titolo

Global West, American frontier : travel, empire, and exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression / / David M. Wrobel

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Albuquerque : , : University of New Mexico Press, , 2013

ISBN

0-8263-5371-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (330 p.)

Collana

Calvin P. Horn lectures in Western history and culture

Classificazione

HIS054000HIS036040HIS036060

Disciplina

978/.02

Soggetti

Travel writing - Historiography

West (U.S.) Description and travel

West (U.S.) Historiography

West (U.S.) Public opinion

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

part one. The global West of the nineteenth century -- part two. The American frontier of the twentieth century.

Sommario/riassunto

"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"--