| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Marguerite S. Shaffer. See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. 2001. Pp. 429. Cloth $55.00, paper $18.95.

In this study, Marguerite S. Shaffer argues that domestic tourism had an important influence over American national identity. Among other things, the growth of the tourist industry helped to reconcile some increasingly apparent contradictions in American life, particularly the conflict between the nation's romantic and mythological ideals of nature, democracy, and liberty and the growing reality of an urban and industrial nation-state. Furthermore, Shaffer claims that tourism fostered an ideal of "mobile citizenship that redefined political rights in consumer terms, celebrating seeing over speaking, purchasing over voting, and traveling over participating," and in the process eroded the nation's civic culture (p. 6). While her narrative ably demonstrates the growing importance of domestic tourism to American culture, the relationship between tourism and the demise of civic culture is somewhat more elusive. 1

Shaffer begins in the aftermath of the Civil War. As the nation turned its gaze toward the west, the growing network of railroads made possible not just industrial development but also an increasingly sophisticated and elegant world of train travel. One byproduct of this new mode of transportation was an increased interest among tourists in touring across America rather than the more traditional model of resort vacationing. Prior to the war, Shaffer argues, tourism had been primarily regional in cast, while in the latter half of the century it moved toward a more mobile ideal. . . .

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