Customer Reviews:
A Must-Read for the U.S. History Student!.......2006-03-09
What a wonderful book! Teddy Roosevelt was brilliantly ressurected for us by George Grant in this comprehensive, yet easy-to-read work (because of the chapter lengths). Section 1 is a biography of his life; Section 2 contains short chapters on his character, and many sides to his life; Section 3 deals with his legacy.
This book gives the reader a good look a life in the U.S. during the last half of the 19th century, as well as one of the period's most beloved of heroes.
Biased -- Better Stuff Available.......2005-06-08
I just wanted a simple biography on Theodore Roosevelt, but this was pretty openly and obviously a book with an agenda. True, the basics about Theodore Roosevelt are here, but the emphasis is on spiritual faith and values. Since I read this book, I read Roosevlet's autobiography and came to realize that he is much more complex than this book suggests.
Carry A Big Stick.......2003-08-29
This is an incredible book, that truly gives you the insight of one of the greatest men that ever lived. Filled with many incredible principles to live by, you WILL enjoy this book and the excitement it brings to your life!
Errors galore in this Conservative Christian propaganda!.......2003-04-22
I've read 40+ plus books by or about TR and this is the worst, one-sided view of this complex, multi-facted man. This is as bad as the radical-left "Howard Zinn-ism" revisionist history of TR's foreign policies.
There are too many "blatant" errors to list in this mini-review, but just for starters:
1). TR did not, as the author claims, visit his mother's Georgia plantation "10 or more times". It is well documented that TR only visited Bulloch Hall twice -once as president and once post-White House. He did not have a very high opinion of most Southerners, despite the author's claims to the contrary. His wife abhorred most Southerners.
2). TR did not force his children, particulary Alice, to attend church every Sunday. Edith was the religious task master of the family and in her quiet manner usually rounded up all kids, except for Alice. Alice was a well-known, open atheist from her teen years until she died. TR and Edith had accepted the teenager's refusal to be confirmed in the Episcopal church or any other church. Their son Archie also grew up to be an agnostic.
3). TR most certainly did NOT shower Edith with flowers and jewels. He never even remembered her birthday (though he never forgot the date of their engagement and wedding anniversay). Edith hated receiving extravagent gifts from anyone, especially her husband. They did have a very happy marriage and home life but he also known for taking off on 3-month hunting trips soon after Edith would deliver another baby.
4). TR most certainly did like to attend parties and was a professional social butterfly because he knew he would probably end up as the main attraction - just what his ego needed. The author paints TR as a man who shunned social gatherings to be with his family 24/7. Definitely not true. He LOVED being around people of all and any type, though his wife certainly like to stoke the home fires more than making the social rounds.
5). TR never made any speeches about abortion. Abortion was not on the radar screen in his time. The author uses quotes that TR said about women not wanting to get married and raise families to make it seem as though TR were speaking direcly on the subject of abortion.
6). TR believed in and preached on the separation of Church and State. He wanted to remove "In God We Trust" from the US coinnage and even pushed one of the leading artists of that time, Grant LaFarge, to create a new design. The "religious right" of his time went ballistic over this decision and he later backed down. He made many speeches proclaiming that the Church stay out of the affairs of the State. Indeed, he was a strong, "old school" Christian who did preach to the citizens the value of religion, a happy home life, and following the morals one teaches to his/her children. However, he also thought a country would head down the dangerous path if a certain religion or belief were forced upon its citizens.
I would not recommend this book on TR to ANYONE.
My, wasn't that just bully!.......2003-04-20
George Grant has written a delightful book about a delightful man.
Book Description
"In the year 2001, you will not see a single horse on Broadway, New York; only autos will be seen. The people of the Earth will be in close communication with Mars by being shot off in great cannons." -Arthur Palm, age 14 years, Milwaukee, 1901
One hundred years ago, Americans celebrated the beginning of a new century. Yesterday's Future gathers nearly one hundred excerpts-some wildly funny, others somber and thoughtful-that show Wisconsin citizens reflecting on America's accomplishments in the previous century and speculating about changes the future would bring. They are drawn from the mainstream press, school newspapers, church bulletins, and periodicals aimed at such audiences as German-language speakers, African-Americans, farmers, and the hearing impaired.
Some speculations come strikingly close to future realities: medical imaging like x-rays and MRI, central air conditioning, snowmobiles, air travel, motion pictures and radio, woman suffrage, and the growth of the suburbs. Other predictions were simply wrong ("the electric stove will never prove much of a factor in the kitchen"), a reflection of their era's interests (admission of Nicaragua and Mexico to the Union), or overly optimistic (communication with beings from other planets). Voices of the Wisconsin Past Series Edited by Michael E. Stevens
Distributed for the State Historical Society of Wisconsin
* A related exhibit at the State Historical Museum in Madison, Wisconsin, opens in November 1999 and continues through 2000.
Customer Reviews:
Future past.......2007-10-17
Yesterday's Future is an excellent collection of various primary sources from Wisconsin about the birth of the 20th century, the progress of the 19th century and the great expectations people had towards the 20th century. The book contains various articles from local newspapers from Wisconsin from ca. 1899-1901.
Book Description
In a major revision of accepted wisdom, this book, originally published by UNC Press in 1991, demonstrates that American social Christianity played an important role in racial reform during the period between Emancipation and the civil rights movement.
As organizations created by the heirs of antislavery sentiment foundered in the mid-1890s, Ralph Luker argues, a new generation of black and white reformers—many of them representatives of American social christianity—explored a variety of solutions to the problem of racial conflict. Some of them helped to organize the Federal Council of Churches in 1909, while others returned to abolitionist and home missionary strategies in organizing the NAACP in 1910 and the National Urban League in 1911. A half century later, such organizations formed the institutional core of America's civil rights movement. Luker also shows that the black prophets of social Christianity who espoused theological personalism created an influential tradition that eventually produced Martin Luther King Jr.
Customer Reviews:
Superbly researched.......1999-04-12
This is a wonderful history of the social gospel movement and how it dealt with the issue of race. Most noteworthy, in my opinion, is its wonderful bibliography - combined with the citations, this totals over 100 pages, providing great references for anyone who wishes to research the topic (as I recently did for a class).
Book Description
In the fall of 1897, eight whaling ships became trapped in the ice on Alaska's northern coast. Without relief, two hundred whalers would starve to death by winter's end. Mercifully, an extraordinary missionary, Tom Lopp, and seven Eskimo herders embarked on a harrowing journey to save the whalers, driving four hundred reindeer more than seven hundred untracked miles.
At the heart of the rescue expedition lies another, in some ways more compelling, journey. In a Far Country is the personal odyssey of Tom and his wife Ellen Lopp-their commitment to the natives and the rugged but happy life they built for themselves amid a treeless tundra at the top of the world. The Lopps pulled through on grit and wits, on humility and humor, on trust and love, and by the grace of God. Their accomplishment would surely have received broader acclaim had it not been eclipsed by two simultaneous events: the Spanish- American War and the Alaska gold rush. The United States and its territories were transformed abruptly and irrevocably by these fits of expansionist fever, and despite the thoughtful, determined guidance of the Lopps, the natives of the North were soon overwhelmed by a force mightier than the fiercest Arctic winter: the twentieth century.
Customer Reviews:
Life in Alaska in the late nineteenth century was frought with constant danger and unimaginable challenges........2007-06-17
They certainly were a hardy lot. Those who chose to come Alaska in the latter part of the nineteenth century faced obstacles and hardships that most of us simply cannot comprehend. So why did they come? Despite the fact that the industry was in decline, fleets of whaling ships from such distant ports as New Bedford, Mass. and San Francisco, CA still made the trek to the Bering Sea each year in an effort to eke out a living. Those in the business of saving souls viewed Alaska as fertile territory to spread the Good News. And as the nineteeth century drew to a close there was yet another important reason why thousands would risk life and limb to come to the Alaskan wilderness. The Great Alaskan Gold Rush was on! "In A Far Country" is author John Taliaferro's remarkable account of the events that were unfolding in Alaska during these years.
Tom and Ellen Lopp were missionaries who came to Alaska in the early 1890's. Tom was a Presbyterian from Indiana while Ellen was a Congregationalist who hailed from Minnesota. Both were assigned to a mission at Cape Prince of Wales on the western tip of the Seward Peninsula. Only a month after meeting in July 1892 Tom and Ellen were married. As things turned out Tom and Ellen would start a family and spend the next dozen years ministering to the Eskimos at Cape Prince of Wales. The work was dirty, difficult and exhausting but proved to be extremely rewarding nonetheless. During their years at Cape Prince of Wales the Lopps opened a mission school and assisted in the effort to establish a herd of reindeer in the area. The man who had attracted both Tom and Ellen to Alaska through an advertisment in "American Missionary" magazine was one Sheldon Jackson. Jackson, who was at the time the general agent for education for the new U.S. Territory of Alaska was absolutely convinced that bringing reindeer to Alaska was the key to the regions economic future. Reindeer were indigenous to neighboring Siberia and had been used there for centuries as both a source of food and for transportation. Jackson envisioned teams of reindeer driven sleds moving people, commodities and even the mail throughout the Alaskan territory. At the same time Sheldon Jackson argued that the reindeer could replace the dwindling numbers of caribou as the primary source of food for the native Eskimo population. "In A Far Country" details how large herds of reindeer would eventually be established in several areas of the Alaskan wilderness. Finally, John Taliaferro spends a great deal of time chronicling what became known as the Overland Relief Expedition. At the end of the summer of 1898 a total of 8 whaling ships who were operating in the Chukchi Sea off the northwest coast of Alaska became trapped in the ice and were unable to leave the area. It was feared that unless help arrived in time more than 200 sailors would eventually starve to death. The Overland Relief Expedition was organized and Tom Lopp was tapped to lead the final leg of this Herculian rescue effort. What an incredible adventure!
I found "In A Far Country" to be quite compelling reading indeed. The publishers quite wisely furnished a detailed map of the region at the beginning of the book and I found myself referring to it again and again. I find that inclusion of maps like this often greatly enhances my understanding of the events being discussed in the text. All in all this is a nicely written book about important history that has been largely forgotten. Recommended!
Excellent adventure .......2007-03-24
This is a little known adventure story of missionary people, personalities, government polititians, native Americans, & foreigners. It has graphic illustrations of problems and errors made when dealing with different cultures in unknown and adverse climates. I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it.
Life on the Edge of Civilization.......2007-03-09
It must have taken individuals of rare inner strength to even have the desire to go establish a Christian mission at Cape Prince of Whales, 55 miles across the Bering Strait to Russia and only 70 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Even more surprising to me was the number of women, single or married to missionaries, who went as well. Tom and Ellen Lopp were both single, that is until six weeks after they met.
This is a story of the mission at Cape Prince of Wales, the Lopp's and of a dramatic rescue where Tom and seven Eskimo herders drove a heard of reindeer some 700 miles to rescue stranded sailors whose ships had become frozen in the ice. This was a trip to rival the other famous trip in the cold, but up until now has been little known.
All in all, a most interesting book about life on the very edge of civilization.
epic adventure.......2007-02-06
This book rightly takes its place among the other tales of heroic arctic travel. It is well researched, the writing is sprightly, and the characterizations both compassionate and vivid.
Unsung Heroes.......2007-02-06
This was a fascinating book. It takes an honest look at subjects as diverse as; culture clashes, mission work, family struggles, man verses nature, government inner workings, and humanity's dual nature (good and evil). A whole cast of unsung heroes finally get their day. Unfortunately, it comes about 100 years too late. Although the author resides in our current day of political correctness, his characters do not. Frankly, I find them refreshing.
The Alaskan frontier is shown as the mishmash that it must have been. Competing groups vied for their own goals and dreams. They inevitably mixed and influenced each other resulting in the lines that formerly demarcated distinct people groups being erased and blurred. The outcomes of this amalgamation ranged from laudable triumphs to scandalous tragedies.
For some reason (maybe growing up in the hot South), I have always enjoyed books about Polar Regions. The first book I ever read was Jack London's Call of the Wild. I read In a Far Country in less than a week because the story kept my interest. It is one of the few books that I really hated to complete. I did not want to leave the characters.
Average customer rating:
- Well done volume on one of America's little wars.
- Definitive Study for its Period
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SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR 1898 (Brassey's History of Uniforms)
Ron Field
Manufacturer: Brassey's UK
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The Spanish-American War: The Story and Photographs
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American Web Equipment: 1910-1967 (Europa Militaria)
ASIN: 1857532724 |
Book Description
An authority on the US Army of the 19th century transports readers back to this first war fought by the US as a global superpower and the subsequent campaign in the Phillippines, a guerilla war precursor of Vietnam. This book is a thorough analysis of the US Army and the Spanish and Filipino forces, with chapters detailing the range of theiruniforms, weapons and equipment, from the US Marines and US Cavalry to the exoyic appearance of the Spanish guerillas and Filipino Bolomen. Lavishly illustrated in bandw and color.
Customer Reviews:
Well done volume on one of America's little wars........2007-07-28
I've always been interested in the Spanish American War. It was the war that changed the course for this country from a small backwoods republic to a colonizing super power on the world stage. In one feel swoop the U.S. acquired Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, Wake Island and Guam. We made up for a late start in the game of colonialism by expanding the empire to encompass two oceans solidifing a strong presence and eventual control over both. Brassey's book, though hard to find, is well worth the effort. It covers the history sufficiently with informative text on the uniforms, equipment and weapons used by the major combatants. There is a fine concentration of period photographs, a few line drawings and contemporary color photographs of uniforms and equipment from museums and collectors. Also the beautiful and imaginative full color illustrations capture troops in the heat of battle or in relaxed off duty poses. Well worth the wait this, is a book that any '98 fan would be happy to own.
Definitive Study for its Period.......1999-07-20
This book covers more than just uniforms, it covers all the items carried or worn by the individual soldiers in this disease-ridden war. Congratulations to the author and the illustrator. This is a valuable compendium, of a size larger than octavo so that the plates are clear, and well constructed. I have been researching the U.S. arms, uniforms, and accoutrements of this period for some forty years now. It takes much more than a slew of pictures and a few gee whizzy captions to impress me. This work does--not only does it cover the details of the uniforms, it also covers the accoutrements and arms of the contending soldiers of both nations. I can vouch for the accuracy of the U.S. portion of the book. The detail shown herein on the Spanish forces, as far as I know, has not been readily available in English at all. Though I have not pursued detailed research on Spanish arms, clothing, and accoutrements, I have kept my eyes out for published materials, and I have not seen it. As much of the non-metallic materiel of this period was subject to hard usage in the field, and because the U.S. soldiers' clothing and equipments were burned for sanitary purposes upon the troops' return home, the cloth and leather of this period that actually saw service in campaign is extremely rare. What is now available is mostly web belts sold off as surplus and firearms and edged weapons the same.
Book Description
Richard Longstreth provides a detailed picture of the early careers of four architects--Bernard Maybeck, Willis Polk, Ernest Coxhead, and A.C. Schweinfurth--who had a decisive impact on the course of design in the San Francisco Bay Area and who stand as significant contributors to American architecture.
Customer Reviews:
A must-have book for any student of California architecture.......2001-02-10
This is the only book I have found with highly detailed information about Ernest Coxhead, Willis Polk and A.C. Schweinfurth. The other architect featured here is Bernard Maybeck, who has been written about in other books. This book is excellent at showing how the works of these four architects were influenced by their mentors, such as A. Page Brown, Mckim, Mead & White, Daniel Burnham, and how their work influenced each other into what was to be known as the San Francisco Bay Regional style. As any architecture book should be, it is well illustrated with photos and drawings of the works of these architects, as well as examples of buildings that influenced them.
Amazon.com
The title Atlantic Crossings refers to the cross-pollination of social thinking between the United States and Europe (primarily Britain) in the first half of the 20th century. Princeton history professor Daniel T. Rodgers's extensive narrative shows that while many Americans saw themselves as essentially isolationist, many ideas that influenced their daily lives, such as city planning and concepts of social security, were not homegrown. A network of government planners, academics, and concerned citizens communicated back and forth across the Atlantic; their correspondence was marked by controversy, and an aversion to "non-American" ideas persists in American social planning to this day (Rodgers notes the scuffles over health care reform in the early 1990s as one example). Rodgers has assembled a prodigious mountain of facts, and he's written a credible and comprehensive account of how people on both sides of the Atlantic contributed in sometimes surprising ways to the social reforms we consider utterly American. --Robert McNamara
Book Description
"The most belated of nations," Theodore Roosevelt called his country during the workmen's compensation fight in 1907. Earlier reformers, progressives of his day, and later New Dealers lamented the nation's resistance to models abroad for correctives to the backwardness of American social politics. Atlantic Crossings is the first major account of the vibrant international network that they constructed--so often obscured by notions of American exceptionalism--and of its profound impact on the United States from the 1870s through 1945.
On a narrative canvas that sweeps across Europe and the United States, Daniel Rodgers retells the story of the classic era of efforts to repair the damages of unbridled capitalism. He reveals the forgotten international roots of such innovations as city planning, rural cooperatives, modernist architecture for public housing, and social insurance, among other reforms. From small beginnings to reconstructions of the new great cities and rural life, and to the wide-ranging mechanics of social security for working people, Rodgers finds the interconnections, adaptations, exchanges, and even rivalries in the Atlantic region's social planning. He uncovers the immense diffusion of talent, ideas, and action that were breathtaking in their range and impact.
The scope of Atlantic Crossings is vast and peopled with the reformers, university men and women, new experts, bureaucrats, politicians, and gifted amateurs. This long durée of contemporary social policy encompassed fierce debate, new conceptions of the role of the state, an acceptance of the importance of expertise in making government policy, and a recognition of a shared destiny in a newly created world.
Customer Reviews:
Superior scholarship, but tedious at times.......2002-03-25
Daniel Rodgers' thesis in Atlantic Crossings is simple and direct: "the reconstruction of American social politics was of a part with movements of politics and ideas throughout the North Atlantic world that trade and capitalism had tied together." (3) He concludes that from the 1870s through World War II, America was not an internalist or an imperialist nation, but instead these years saw an "opening" for social reformers in the U.S. to import foreign models and ideals from other North Atlantic countries. Furthermore, these imported policies and reforms (mostly from Britain and Germany) were not adopted in America (if at all) unchanged upon reaching the Atlantic's western shores, but instead were adapted to the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of American society and political structure. Finally, Rodgers argues, the seeds of the New Deal can be found in the activities and positions of the social reform activists of the last two decades of the 19th century and the first thirty years of the 20th century.
Rodgers convincingly supports his thesis by describing "a largely forgotten world of transnational borrowings and imitation, adaptation and transformation" (7) from the 1870s through the 1940s, a time during which Americans had an abundance of solutions to the myriad social problems of their day. This "borrowing" was a process that changed significantly over time. Initially, Americans were primarily recipients of reform ideas from abroad. Later, during the prosperity of the 1920s, a more even exchange of social solutions took place among North Atlantic countries, which eventually led to "a great gathering...of proposals and ideas" in the New Deal. Finally, by the end of World War II, the differing experiences of the nations of the North Atlantic world and the varying effects suffered by each from the conflict largely ended the former transnational exchange, and saw the Cold War rise of American exceptionalism.
Rodgers provides numerous convincing examples of the cross-national exchange process of ideas and reforms to illustrate his arguments. Workmen's compensation insurance in America, for example, was based upon a pre-World War I British model, a "ready made solution with a history of success behind it" (248) that made similar acts in the U.S. possible. Additionally, housing, health and streetcars were a major concern of American social reformers in large cities, who often borrowed ideas about municipally-guided urban and industrial projects from experiments and visions in Berlin and London. As Rodgers notes regarding the new "self-owned" city, "municipalization was the first important Atlantic-wide progressive project...[that] borrowed experience and transnational example." (159) European precedents gave American progressives "a set of working, practical examples." (144) "He describes, however, in chapters 5 and 6, the impossibility of wholesale American import of strong European municipality due to the unique and equally strong traditions in the U.S. in favor of property rights, a tradition buttressed and maintained by legal tradition and the courts. One need only look at excess condemnation, widely practiced in Paris and London, to see an example of reforms disallowed by the courts, which held that public interests of taste and beauty did not surmount the rights of property owners. Housing in America "was a private matter," (196) unlike the European examples progressives saw.
Although some reviewers have taken exception with Rodgers' claim that within the progressive movement's ideology one can see the footers of the New Deal, his argument is convincing. What New Dealers "did best," he asserts, "was to throw in to the breach, with verve and imagination, schemes set in motion years or decades before." (415) A large number of New Deal projects came out of the old Atlantic progressive connection, and in "gathering in so much of the progressive agenda, the New Deal gathered in large chunks of European experience as well." (416)
Perhaps the weakness in Atlantic Crossings is that which is left out, not in the arguments Rodgers articulately presents. First, it is surprising that Rodgers presents no detailed discussion regarding education reform, particularly when this issue was so important to the Germans at the time. Second, one would never know that there was an American South during this time period, a region where progressives were active even despite a lack of urban areas there. Nevertheless, Rodgers has done a masterful job of comparative history by emphasizing trans-national borrowing and cooperation.
The next definitive work on the Progressive Era........1998-12-31
This is the policy-side answer to Kloppenberg's UNCERTAIN VICTORY. While that book focussed on intellectual links between European (esp. German or French) thought and early American pragmatism, Rodgers seeks more practical applications, well into the 20th century. He is so well versed in the literature that scant references are made to secondary sources. It is rich in the literature of the time, particularly journals, magazines, and newspapers from several different countries. Interestingly, unlike Kloppenberg this book examines England and Scotland which provide springboards for American reforms. Rodgers' thesis is that the Europeans tried numerous policies which Americans learned about and then implemented, almost always later than their counterparts across the Atlantic--and sometimes with very limited success. The book is also noteworthy for some of the most practical applications of MODERNISM yet seen in contemporary scholarship. This is a hot topic, largely seen in discussions of art or literature. Here Rodgers takes all that knowledge, absorbs it, and then demonstrates it in action across the POLITICAL spectrum. Despite the enormous research behind it, Rodgers has written an enjoyable, readable work that is of considerable importance. After all, this is the author of the famous article, "An Obituary for the Progressive Movement," (1970) which claimed that there NEVER WAS such a movement. Here Rodgers answers his own claim, saying that the American reform impulse built upon a European foundation and produced policies which survive to the present. My only complaint is that this book is slanted TOWARDS Europe, with maybe 60% of the discussion dwelling across the Atlantic ... the format gets a little tedious, with most chapters beginning in Europe, then the Americans pick up on the policy (welfare, municipal gas/water etc) and then they try it themselves. This is nitpicking, though, for such a substantive, well-researched, lucid work that defines this generation's scholarship on the Progressive Era.
Book Description
Why did African-American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the nineteenth century, during a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. This is the question at the center of Tate's examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is more than a literary study; it is also a social and intellectual history--a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan called "the Dark Ages of recent American history." Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, Tate argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine's happiness and economic prosperity. More importantly, that plot encodes a resonant cultural narrative--a domestic allegory--about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked in these novels, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African-Americans' collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into consummations of civil liberty.
Book Description
"See America First is the first comprehensive assessment of tourism and the formation of a twentieth-century American identity. The voyage of discovery is both individual and national, cultural and personal. . . . Shaffer shows how local and regional businesses collaborated to create a national message that a willing nation embraced." -Hal Rothman, University of Nevada-Las Vegas
In See America First, Marguerite Shaffer chronicles the birth of modern American tourism between 1880 and 1940, linking tourism to the simultaneous growth of national transportation systems, print media, a national market, and a middle class with money and time to spend on leisure. Focusing on the See America First slogan and idea employed at different times by railroads, guidebook publishers, Western boosters, and Good Roads advocates, she describes both the modern marketing strategies used to promote tourism and the messages of patriotism and loyalty embedded in the tourist experience. She shows how tourists as consumers participated in the search for a national identity that could assuage their anxieties about American society and culture.
Generously illustrated with images from advertisements, guidebooks, and travelogues, See America First demonstrates that the promotion of tourist landscapes and the consumption of tourist experiences were central to the development of an American identity
Customer Reviews:
A must-read for the 'academic-traveler'!.......2002-01-04
I speak as both an academic and general reader when I say that Marguerite S. Shaffer's See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940, is a "must-read" for anyone interested in travel, tourism, history, nature, marketing, and American culture in general. In December, I received Shaffer's book as a gift right before I went home for winter break - a time when most college students like myself would prefer not to even look at anything that resembles a textbook. However, I found that once embarking on the engaging text, I was hard-pressed to stop!
See America First opens with a passage straight out of a sentimental movie: it is the spring of 1892, and Methodist minister Stephen Merritt is leaving his home in New York City to venture across the country. He writes of his anticipation that he will "see the land (he) fondly call(s) (his) own" (1) on the tour to Alaska and California. Each chapter is introduced in an equally engaging manner, and sheds light on general themes. Shaffer's work is well-organized as it chronicles western tourism after the Civil War - as the nation tried to bind itself together after a divisive four-year struggle at the same time that the seemingly boundless west was rapidly finishing its settlement. As a culture, the nation wanted to create for itself a type of heritage that older European countries could proclaim - but remain unique in its identity. By connecting the emerging consumer culture in the United States with the marketing "national tourism," Shaffer presents a substantiated argument that the shared national identity of America and its values were actually inspired by popular Western mythology. The actual See America First movement thus serves as the bulk of her exhaustively researched work. We learn of the developments in transportation, technology, and communication that the government endorsed in an effort to reach its goal. However, Shaffer also affirms that this was not a "one-sided" lecture by commercialism - it was the foundation for a larger dialogue of values and ideals.
As a history and American studies major, I can't help but appreciate the fact that I now know how these "attractions" got their birth - and how the railroad, hotels, and leisure culture worked together to symbolize the ideal America. On an academic note, Shaffer's bibliography is very extensive - which is useful to anyone who would like to independently follow up on a particular aspect of her original research. Of course, there are also numerous visual features including postcards, photos, and advertisements ("The Call of the Mountains!...Vacations in Glacier National Park" proclaimed one that most readily comes to my mind), all of which served as a way for me to connect with those who enjoyed the national parks and west long before I did. Personally, that is the best part of See America First: it conjured up fond memories of my own trips out west with my family. Even though I was a youth, I remember a powerful sense of beauty, purity, and idealism as we spent time at Glacier, Yellowstone, and other National Parks.
On first reading, I flew through See America First too quickly, so I am now re-reading it just for enjoyment and additional nostalgia - and I am also making plans with my family to take another two-week tour this summer. I look forward to future books by Shaffer!
Mobile Citizenship.......2001-12-06
Gasoline prices falling. The automobile industry urging us to "Keep America Rolling." Chambers of Commerce and tourist bureaus asking us to do our patriotic duty: travel. The national parks opening their gates for free, offering a glimpse of the sublime in service of communal "healing." The aftermath of September 11? Yes, but as Marguerite S. Shaffer shows us in See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2001), we've been down this road before.
Shaffer chronicles the rise of what she calls "national tourism" at the turn of the 20th century, in which touring was characterized as not only a ritual of American citizenship but also a form of "virtuous consumption" (39), the perfect melding of patriotism and commercial progress. In the wake of the Civil War, travel was promoted as a means of witnessing the unfolding of a flourishing, united nation: by "consuming" the national narrative through historical landmarks and the spectacle of nature, tourists were able to participate in a larger dialogue about personal and public memory (e.g., through scrapbooks and journals), individual and national identity. Of course, these patriotic questers required an America worthy of their efforts. Enter the See America First movement, which Shaffer describes as a "Western booster campaign" whose purpose was to establish the West as the geographical, commercial, and political equal of the Northeastern United States while simultaneously promoting the "ideal" West as the "true" America. See America First exploited the existing ideological infrastructure of Manifest Destiny to create a "canon" of American tourist attractions that embodied a distinct national mythology based on such nostalgic images as untamed nature, noble savages, and small-town life. Sustaining this mythology, however, required a massive physical infrastructure of roads, hotels, and tourist attractions--all heavily subsidized by boosters and government officials. Thus the marketing of the American West reified a cultural meaning of tourism that depended as much on an expansive rhetoric of commercialism as an expansive body of land.
Like all good histories, See America First not only reveals a vivid past but brings its themes to bear on our own urgent and fraught present. Two examples are particularly worthy of mention. First, Shaffer observes that in the unprecedented prosperity of the post-World War II era, tourism became less a patriotic rite of passage than "the ultimate quest for self-indulgent individual pleasure and hedonistic personal freedom in a culture of mass consumption that revolved around spectacle, fantasy, and desire" (320). These post-September 11 days represent the inverse of that situation: a lengthy period of economic expansion has come to an abrupt and painful end, and travel is being promoted as an antidote to the fear and unease caused by the terrorist attacks and a patriotic defense of "our way of life." Second, this re-emergence of national tourism as a form of virtuous consumption offers us a cautionary tale. For as Shaffer argues, "mobile citizenship . . . redefined political rights in consumer terms, celebrating seeing over speaking, purchasing over voting, and traveling over participating" (6). Given the recent bailout of the travel and tourism industry, the voluntary forfeiture of civil liberties in the name of the war on terrorism, and the daily exhortations to keep the world free for democracy by spending, spending, spending . . . this argument is as timely as it is original.
See America First is an academic book, but general readers should not be deterred. Meticulously researched, engagingly written, and generously illustrated with old photographs, postcards, and travel brochures, it should satisfy anyone with an interest in the period, the industries, or the themes at the heart of Shaffer's study, from tourists to travel literature aficionados, from collectors of tourist memorabilia to historians of the environment and consumer culture.
Book Description
With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants.
At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before.
Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources--including recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters--Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets, hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American immigration control and race relations.
Customer Reviews:
diatribe.......2005-12-05
Erika Lee is a very angry woman. Her diatribe on American immigration policy equates anyone who is concerned about porous borders , the enforcement of laws in a nation of laws, and containment of disease as being a racist. It's hardly fair. And it detracts from her history of immigration legislation and enforcement. Yes, the Chinese Exclusion Act was reprehensible. Yes, we were and are a nation filled with racial prejudices and hatreds.
Immigration restrictions on other ethnic groups, according to Lee, were reflections of a racist policy towards Asians. She admits that the numbers of Asian immigrants was historically small and generally confined to the west coast. She then invests California, and San Francisco in particular, with an enormous amount of political power which was used to restrict immigration throughout the country. Lee is not convincing in her contention that the immigration issue was driven purely by an irrational racist beliefs and concerns over invading Asian hordes. She did not fully explain how the United States Congress, 3,000 miles distant, and generally unaffected by Asian immigration would develop a policy arising out of racism towards a group of which they were barely aware.
Exclusion based upon race is wrong. Looking different, having different cultural traditions, and not speaking the dominant language of English were and are roadblocks for all immigrants, not just the Chinese. Lee is a constant apologist for behaving as an outsider while expecting to be treated as an insider. Blaming national policy decisions on racial attitudes is too simplistic. Lee could have made an argument which addressed the nativistic xenophobia that was prevalent in the Gilded Age which was partly due to the arrival of masses of southern and eastern European immigrants. She could have argued that the closing and consequent filling of the frontier caused concerns about immigration in general. She contends that Angel Island was more racist than Ellis Island. She is too quick to condemn.
Chapter Four does provide valuable information on Chinese coming to the United States as sojourners. She explains that the immigrants are not unskilled laborers, but rather people who could improve the nation. She provides a good comparison between unskilled Mexican and Asian immigrants who come to this country in order to provide for their families back in the home country. Although she describes how employers needed these laborers, she doesn't investigate the economic impact of taking earnings out of the country rather than investing them in the country. She also provides a good description of how the Chinese with the help of immigration attorneys sought to and often did circumvent the law. She seems to imply that if some people can find loopholes in laws, then the laws should be repealed, or that people who manage to arrive in this country illegally should be rewarded for their tenacity by receiving amnesty.
Lee has researched her subject thoroughly. Her list of oral and written primary documents is impressive. However, Lee's book graphically demonstrates the difficulty that the United States now has in reforming its immigration policies and enforcing its borders (what Lee refers to as gatekeepers). To paraphrase Robert Frost, good fences make good neighbors. It appears that a concern for national security will generate an automatic response that such concerns are racist rather than a practical solution to security issues.
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