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Tourism emerged as an important cultural activity in the United
States in the 1820s as steamboats and canals allowed for greater
mobility and the nation's writers and artists focused their
attention on American scenery. From the 1820s until well after
the Civil War, American artists, like Thomas Cole and Frederic
Church, depicted American tourist attractions in their work, and
often made their reputations on those paintings. Writers like
Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, and James described their visits to
the same attractions or incorporated them into their fiction. The
work of these artists and writers conferred value on the scenes
represented and helped shape the vision of the tourists who
visited them. This interest in scenery permeated the work of both
serious and popular writers and artists, and they produced
thousands of images and descriptions of America's tourist
attractions for the numerous guidebooks, magazines, and other
publications devoted to travel in the United States during the
period.
Drawing on this fascinating body of material, Sacred Places
examines the vital role which tourism played in fulfilling the
cultural needs of nineteenth-century Americans. America was a new
country in search of a national identity. Educated Americans
desperately wished to meet European standards of culture and, at
the same time, to develop a distinctly American literature and
art. Tourism offered a means of defining America as a place and
taking pride in the special features of its landscape. The
country's magnificent natural wonders were a substitute for the
cathedrals and monuments, the sense of history that Europe had
built over the centuries. Moreover, Sears argues, tourist
attractions like Mammoth Cave, Auburn Cemetery, Yosemite,
and Yellowstone functioned as sacred places for a nation with a
diversity of religious sects and without ancient religious and
national shrines. For nineteenth-century Americans, whose vision
was shaped by the aesthetics of the sublime and the picturesque
and by the popular nineteenth-century Romantic view of nature as
temple, such places fulfilled their urgent need for cultural
monuments and for places to visit which transcended ordinary
reality.
But these nineteenth-century tourist attractions were also arenas
of consumption. Niagara Falls was the most sublime of God's
creations, a sacred place, which, like Auburn Cemetery, was
supposed to have a profound moral effect on the spectator. But it
was also an emporium of culture where the tourist shopped for
Niagara's wonders and for little replicas of the Falls in the
form of souvenirs. In Sacred Places, Sears describes how this
strange, sometimes amusing, juxtaposition of the mythic and the
trivial, the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the
commercial remained a significant feature of American tourist
attractions even after efforts were made at Yosemite,
Yellowstone, and Niagara Falls to curb commercial and industrial
intrusions.
Sears also explores how the nineteenth-century idealization of
home stimulated the tourists' response to such places as the
Willey House in the White ains, the rural cemeteries, and
even the newly established asylums for the deaf, dumb, blind, and
insane. And, in an intriguing account of Mauch Chunk,
Pennsylvania, he examines the reasons why an important
nineteenth-century anthracite transportation center was also a
major tourist attraction.
Most of the attractions discussed in this book are still visited
by millions of Americans. By illuminating their cultural meaning,
Sacred Places prompts us to reflect on our own motivations and
responses as tourists and reveals why tourism was and still is
such an important part of American life.