1st Edition

Unspeakable Awfulness America Through the Eyes of European Travelers, 1865-1900

By Kenneth D. Rose Copyright 2014
288 Pages 25 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

288 Pages 25 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

288 Pages 25 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

The late nineteenth century was a golden age for European travel in the United States. For prosperous Europeans, a journey to America was a fresh alternative to the more familiar ‘Grand Tour’ of their own continent, promising encounters with a vast, wild landscape, and with people whose culture was similar enough to their own to be intelligible, yet different enough to be interesting. Their... Read more

Introduction

Chapter 1: Character, Class, Dress, Advertising

Chapter 2: The Built Environment: Cities and Boosterism, Accomodations and Transportation

Chapter 3: Culture: Aesthetics, Language, Music, Humor, Copyright and Journalism

Chapter 4: Personal Habits: Dining, Drinking, Tobacco Chewing, and Gun Use

Chapter 5: Domestic Relations: Women, Men, Children and Their Education

Chapter 6: Race, Immigration, and Religion

Chapter 7: War, Politics, and Patriotism

Chapter 8: The West: Landscape, Human Inhabitants, and Decline

Conclusion

Biography

Kenneth D. Rose teaches history at California State University, Chico. He is the author of Myth of the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in World War II, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture, and American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition.

"The book provides an excellent introduction to the 19th-century US following the Civil War, and thanks to the far-reaching number of topics and documented sources, inherently suggests numerous points of exploration for further study and research. Abundant notes, ample illustrations, and a very extensive bibliography.  Summing Up: Highly recommended." - R. A. Shaddy, Queens  College, CHOICE

"In researching this subject, Rose has clearly plumbed the depths of the extant published travel literature from this era. He demonstrates a nearly encyclopedic understanding of this material…Overall, Rose’s book is a welcome and necessary addition, an impressive, broadly sourced, well written work." -Richard Gassan, American University of Sharjah, The American Historical Review