NOTES
197 NOTES Y Introduction 1. John White, Sketches from America: Part I.—Canada; Part II.—A Pic-nic to the Rocky Mountains; Part III.—The Irish in America (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1870), 230. The work is now available in a British Library Historical Print Edition, 2011. White used “lions” as a synonym for attractions; the four massive lion statues that grace London’s Trafalgar Square, the work of sculptor Sir Edward Lanseer, were erected in 1868 and were almost certainly the inspiration for White’s use of the term. 2. Ibid., 231–32. 3. Ray Allen Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). 4. The notion that travel writers contributed in a significant way to the body of western mythology that developed in the nineteenth century is certainly evident in Billington’s Land of Savagery as well as in Robert G. Athearn’s Westward the Briton: The Far West, 1865–1900, as Seen by British Sportsmen and Capitalists, Ranchers and Homesteaders, Lords and Ladies (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953; reprinted, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books, 1962), 7–8. 5. See, for example, Ray Allen Billington’s influential textbook Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (New York: Macmillan, 1949); Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950); and two anthologies of nineteenth-century European travelers’ descriptions of the United States: Allan Nevins’s America Through British Eyes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948); and Oscar Handlin, This Was America: True Accounts of People and Places, Manners and Customs, as Recorded by European Travelers to the Western Shore in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949). For more on the manifestations of early Cold War American exceptionalism in a range of academic disciplines, including history, see John Diggins, 198 Notes to pages 4–6 The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 187–200. 6. Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1881); Josiah Royce, California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886). 7. Frederick Jackson Turner used the metaphor of the frontier as “the outer edge of the wave”; see “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays, ed. John Mack Faragher (New York: Henry Holt, 1994; reprinted, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 31–60, 32; page references from the 1998 edition. 8. Regarding the great volume of nineteenth-century travel accounts, Mary Suzanne Schriber notes that 1,765 books of travel were published in the United States between 1830 and 1900; see her Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830–1920 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 2. Lynne Withey, in Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915 (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 234, states that at least 1,044 travel books about the Middle East were published in the nineteenth century. Max Berger, in The British Traveller in America, 1836–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 14, notes that 230 accounts by British travelers to America were published between 1836 and 1860. For a good introduction to a wide range of the better-known nineteenth-century travelers’ accounts of the West, see John Francis McDermott, ed., Travelers on the Western Frontier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Billington, Land of Savagery; and, most recently, Roger L. Nichols, “Western Attractions: Europeans and America,” Pacific Historical Review 74 (2005): 1–17. 9. There is an abundance of writing about travel writing that tries to chart the contours of the genre, or determine the degree to which it is a genre at all. Among the most useful entrées into these debates are: Michael Kowalewski, “Introduction: The Modern Literature of Travel,” in his edited collection Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 1–16; Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, introduction to their coedited volume The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–17; Jan Borm, “Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and...
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