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

By: Wrobel, David MMaterial type: TextTextSeries: Calvin P. Horn lectures in Western history and culturePublisher: Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 2013Description: 1 online resource (330 pages) : illustrations, map, portraitsContent type: text Media type: computer Carrier type: online resourceISBN: 9780826353719Subject(s): Travel writing -- Historiography | West (U.S.) -- Description and travel | West (U.S.) -- Historiography | West (U.S.) -- Public opinionGenre/Form: Electronic books.Additional physical formats: Print version:: Global West, American frontier : travel, empire, and exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression.DDC classification: 978/.02 LOC classification: F595.3 | .W76 2013Online resources: Click to View
Contents:
part one. The global West of the nineteenth century -- part two. The American frontier of the twentieth century.
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.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.

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

"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.

Description based on print version record.

Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest, 2015. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest affiliated libraries.

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