Book Review

Tourism as a scholarly subject seems as popular as Yosemite Valley in summer. Marguerite S. Shaffer profits from that new work to produce a broad and interesting synthesis of the American experience of tourism. Her book distinguishes itself from much recent scholarship on the topic by avoiding a simplistic portrayal of big business and government as evil wolves and tourists as gullible and unsophisticated sheep. She explores both the creation of the tourist industry and tourists' responses to it by developing a concept she calls "national tourism." Combining a set of useful theoretical viewpoints with skillful reading of print and visual materials, Shaffer builds an argument about the role that tourism played in creating the modern nation-state. In the early twentieth century, tourism became a way for the expanding middle class to reconcile "nature's nation" with the urban-industrial state. By becoming consumers of the "real America" by traveling through it, American tourists believed they would evolve into virtuous citizens.

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