Introduction: Not-So-Innocents Abroad

In this third installment in our Dissent series “Party of the Future: Voices from the Millennial Generation,” seven authors offer essays on their time abroad that break with the vision Mark Twain and so many novelists have put forward of naïve Americans getting life lessons from worldly Europeans. Our seven did not arrive on foreign shores carrying unearned confidence. Whether they went abroad in the role of visitor, soldier, reporter, or Peace Corps volunteer, they did everything they could to avoid being viewed as Ugly Americans who respect neither the language nor the culture of the country they are in.