| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Blessed with Tourists: The Borderlands of Religion and Tourism in San Antonio. By Thomas S. Bremer. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiv, 207 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2912-9. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5580-4.)
San Antonio was a relic, and, Stephen Crane believed, it should have remained a totem to the Spanish missionary zeal. But when the journalist visited the Alamo city in 1889, he found it had become home to modernizing Protestants praying to the "almighty trolley" and holding little regard for "the holy places of legends" (Stephen Crane, Tales, Sketches, and Reports, ed. Fredson Bowers, 1973; pp. 468–69). Yet it was this divine heritage that lured Crane and others to town, seeking "the poetry of life in Texas" (ibid.).	1
The link between religion and tourism that Crane embodied is the subject of Thomas S. Bremer's fine first book. Intrigued by the "ways that modern people imagine religion and its role in their modern world" (p. 3), he argues that their search for its physical artifacts parallels that of contemporary tourists. Both groups are attached to special places, travel to them in similar ways, and, once on the scene, act alike—snapping photographs, buying mementos, gawking. Should their paths cross in front of San Antonio's San Fernando Cathedral, say, their behavior can be indistinguishable.	. . .

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