The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790-1830 Review

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The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790-1830 ReviewGassan's new study on the Hudson Valley and its evolution into a popular destination for a newly emerging element of Northeastern American society offers a long list of potential readers (students, scholars and the curious novices) an invaluable correction to our understanding of the period's US economic and social developments. By charting the intersecting factors that contributed to the rise of middle class tourism in the Hudson Valley, that includes the often neglected interconnecting actors in the US economy--the hotel industry, transport and property speculators as well as advertising/popular culture--Gassan has invited his readers to reconsider the transformations that ultimately imprinted a new American consciousness on the emerging Middle Class. This book will be a valuable addition to undergraduate classrooms as it highlights what is often missed by industry textbooks and demonstrates clearly how to effectively fuse diverse contributing factors to significant societal changes like those contributing to a new era in Northeast US history. Highly recommended to Americanists and for the classes they teach.The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790-1830 OverviewToday the idea of traveling within the United States for leisure purposes is so commonplace it is hard to imagine a time when tourism was not a staple of our cultural life. Yet as Richard H. Gassan persuasively demonstrates, at the beginning of the nineteenth century travel for leisure was strictly an aristocratic luxury beyond the means of ordinary Americans. It wasn t until the second decade of the century that the first middle-class tourists began to follow the lead of the well-to-do, making trips up the Hudson River valley north of New York City, and in a few cases beyond. At first just a trickle, by 1830 the tide of tourism had become a flood, a cultural change that signaled a profound societal shift as the United States stepped onto the road that would eventually lead to a modern consumer society. According to Gassan, the origins of American tourism in the Hudson Valley can be traced to a confluence of historical accidents, including the proximity of the region to the most rapidly growing financial and population center in the country, with its expanding middle class, and the remarkable beauty of the valley itself. But other developments also played a role, from the proliferation of hotels to accommodate tourists, to the construction of an efficient transportation network to get them to their destinations, to the creation of a set of cultural attractions that invested their experience with meaning. In the works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper and the paintings of Thomas Cole and others of the Hudson River School, travelers in the region encountered the nation s first literary and artistic movements. Tourism thus did more than provide an escape from the routines of everyday urban life; it also helped Americans of the early republic shape a sense of national identity.

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