| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Observing America: The Commentary of British Visitors to the United States, 1890–1950. By Robert Frankel. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. xvi, 318 pp. $50.00, ISBN 0-299-21880-5.)

"We go forth all to seek America," wrote Waldo David Frank in Our America (1919), "and in the seeking we create her." Even before the Columbian landfall, that landmass west of Europe was treated as a plastic place, shaped by the hopes and fears of those who lived in the so-called Old World. So when Frank wrote about his homeland after working as a journalist in France, he located his book in the transatlantic tradition by thanking his French colleagues for helping him not only "to seek" but "to see" America, those two verbs vitally connected both phonologically and psychologically (Our America, pp. 6, 10). Robert Frankel heads his fine book with an epigraph from Walt Whitman, welcoming "the procession" of visitors who come to help, advise, and investigate "this great problem, democratic America" (p. vii). Americans were rarely as appreciative as Frank and Whitman. A theme running insidiously beneath Frankel's discussion of some British visitors to the United States between 1890 and 1950 is the poor treatment they received at the hands of their hosts. It is to their credit that they usually (if not always) refused to let that treatment affect their judgment.

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