In the winter of 1859, the Boston poet Julia Ward Howe sailed for Cuba; and in the winter of 1860, Ticknor and Fields published an account of her travel. A Trip to Cuba appeared only months after the same firm had published Richard Henry Dana's story of his “vacation voyage,” To Cuba and Back. These two narratives responded to a burgeoning American interest in the Caribbean island that promised recuperation to American invalids and adventure for military “filibusters.” Howe's narrative demonstrated a self-conscious familiarity with antebellum travel writing more broadly, however, as she playfully resisted yet ultimately upheld various conventions of a genre that had become a staple of the American literary marketplace. “I do not know why all celebrated people who write books of travel begin by describing their days of seasickness,” she noted, before discussing her own shipboard illness. She followed similar cues as she blended elements of autobiography, the social sketch, nature writing, and political and social commentary. Across 250 “sprightly” pages, readers were offered a familiar melange of humorous portraits, detailed descriptions of “foreign” institutions, and extensive commentary on local customs and social mores.Footnote ¹

Yet for all this book had to say about Cuba, it revealed far more about Julia Ward Howe. Readers could glimpse the witty conversationalist and the sensitive poet, as well as the entitled middle-class American whose exasperation at Cuban service occasionally punctuated her account. They could also come away from the book with a sense of Howe's political and social commitments, especially her emerging support for women's rights and her opposition to slavery. Howe was, in fact, traveling with two prominent Boston abolitionists: her husband, the famed reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, and the ailing Unitarian-Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker, who was seeking respite from the tuberculosis that would shortly kill him. So certain was Howe's sense of herself and her audience as “orthodox” antislavery on “this mighty question” that she allowed herself a startling degree of candor on the subject of race and labor, “one heretical whisper,” as she put it, “very small and low.” She recorded her shock at the contrast between the “negro of the North” (an “ideal negro . . . refined by white culture, elevated by white blood”) and the “negro among negroes” (a “coarse, grinning, flat-footed, thick-skulled creature . . . lazy as the laziest of brutes”), whom she encountered in the West Indies. Confronting what she perceived to be the free Afro-Caribbean's refusal to work, Howe posed the “unwelcome question” whether “compulsory labor may be better than none.”Footnote ²

Howe's text embodies many of the difficulties associated with the travel narrative, which perhaps more than most literary genres calls out for historical analysis. We can note the way Howe created her literary persona “Hulia” to present comic, urbane, and often condescending commentary on the places and people of Cuba. We can observe the way her narrative followed or departed from earlier entries in the genre or how it presented a distinctively feminine perspective on the travel adventure. But fully understanding this book, especially its unsettling comments on compulsory labor, requires more comprehensive contextualization. We must know something, for example, about the limitations of northern antislavery opinion, about middle-class American views of labor, about the economic framework that informed British and American views of Caribbean emancipation, and about US relations with its Caribbean neighbors in the 1850s. And we must be able to situate her book in the broader cultural and intellectual contexts from which it emerged and into which it entered. Her comments drew a sharp rebuke from William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, which no doubt recognized the similarity between her commentary and Thomas Carlyle's dyspeptic “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” Such circuits of influence and response suggest some interesting lines of analysis for the intellectual historian. Did Howe's journey to the Caribbean induce her to accept ideas that were swirling around but were either too inflammatory or toxic to be domesticated in Boston? Did her abolitionist traveling companions draw similar conclusions? Did they discuss the issue on the trip? Can we read her printed musings on the possible necessity of coerced labor as an instance of fringe ideas working their way into the mainstream?Footnote ³

As both the experience of travel and the narratives it has produced have been historically conditioned, so historical analysis is necessary to recover, explain, and interpret them. Yet historians seem largely to have ceded travel studies to literary and cultural scholars, who often employ historicist methods but who operate under a different set of assumptions and with different ultimate questions in mind. Historians have long used travel narratives as historical documents, but with few exceptions they have not developed larger thematic ways of understanding the history of travel. The two very different volumes under consideration here provoke some meditation on disciplinary distinctions while urging us to think about the literary and historical significance of travel in American culture. The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing presents the big picture and the long view, with commissioned essays ranging from the seventeenth century to the present and encompassing travel in specific domestic sites and international regions. The authors, nearly all from English departments, focus largely on travel accounts that appeared in some published form. By contrast, Mark Rennella's The Boston Cosmopolitans offers an extended analysis of one specific group of travelers in one specific time period. Here the focus moves beyond literary texts to examine how travel helped shape the work of a handful of artists and intellectuals who in turn left their mark on the culture of Boston and the United States. Read together, they suggest that while literary scholars have done much to help us read travel texts—to see the ideological, cultural, and rhetorical work these texts perform—there is still much for intellectual and cultural historians to do in exploring the precise difference that travel has made in the thought and culture of specific individuals or eras.

The introduction and thirteen essays in the Cambridge volume highlight the difficulties and complexities that accompany attempts to define the travel narrative. Thwarting any tidy sense of genre, travel writing can resemble ethnography, nature writing, literary criticism, adventure tales, promotional literature, personal narrative, or spiritual quest. It can confuse perception and reality, or desire and description. In this way it shares some generic difficulties, say the editors Judith Hamera and Alfred Bendixen, with autobiography, “another nonfiction genre that we are only now learning how to read” (2). Further, as with Howe's Cuba narrative, travel writing always reveals at least two subjects: the place it describes and the perceiving self authoring that description. Because this is a volume of American travel writing, Hamera and Bendixen call attention to how the United States represents a third subject that usually looms somewhere above or beneath the surface. American travel writing, whether it explores domestic or foreign spaces, has been a tool of “self- and national fashioning”; it has in various ways “defined, reflected, or constructed American identity” (1).

To impose some order on the “complex, fluid, multiple-layered nature” of American travel writing, the editors have divided the Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing into three sections: “Confronting the American Landscape,” which includes two framing chapters as well as individual essays on Niagara, the Mississippi, and the Southwest; “Americans Abroad,” which explores American encounters in Europe, the Holy Land, Latin America, and the Pacific islands; and “Social Scenes and American Sites,” which, somewhat less coherently, brings together chapters on African Americans, women, and late twentieth-century writers (3). Unsurprisingly, given the centrality of travel and travel writing to American literary history, most of the nation's best-known authors make appearances, sometimes multiple ones. Yet interspersed with such usual suspects as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and other literary figures are considerations of the natural histories of William Bartram and Timothy Flint, the journals of Lewis and Clark, the narratives of Equiano and Harriet Jacobs, and the diaries of westering women. The focus nonetheless remains, with few exceptions, on literary nonfiction rather than on broadly cultural texts; there are, for example, no commercial guidebooks, encyclopedias, adventure stories, or National Geographic-like magazines.

The essays all demonstrate that, whether they wrote about Taos, Italy, or the Amazon, American travel writers rarely encountered their destinations as innocent terra incognita. Instead, prior associations, projections, fears, and fantasies created a kind of cultural baggage that accompanied and could easily outweigh the traveler's literal luggage. Building on the work of Mary Louise Pratt's 1992 Imperial Eyes, which demonstrated how nineteenth-century travel writing functioned within the larger ideological apparatus of European empire, Terry Caesar's essay on South America and Christopher McBride's on the “Pacific and beyond” examine how American travelers gave expression to desires of national domination and racial superiority in their accounts of contact with foreign places and peoples. Sometimes writers saw what they wanted to see, but other times they saw what they had been primed to see by writers before them. Christopher Mulvey's chapter chronicles the difficulty of viewing the Niagara Falls with fresh eyes, and Thomas Ruys Smith's holds in tension the “two rivers”—one real, one imaginary—that constantly surface in writings about the Mississippi. The power of projection over description emerges even more starkly in writing on Jerusalem, where, as Hilton Obenzinger shows, the sacred land's role in biblical history and millennial prophecy completely overwhelmed the mundane and quotidian realities of the physical place for many writers.

The first section of the book details just how central the American landscape has been to American authors. Jefferson patiently enumerated Virginia's rivers, Cooper set his novels in the forests of upstate New York, the Transcendentalists searched for spiritual meaning in the New England woods, and Mark Twain gave iconic meaning to the Mississippi River. Focusing on “origins,” Philip Gould examines several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English texts that described North America and were “written and published for metropolitan readers” with various economic, scientific, or spiritual interests in the continent. His discussion brings together the disparate narratives of William Penn, William Byrd, John Bartram, Mary Rowlandson, and John Woolman, among others, as early works that helped give shape to the hodgepodge genre of American travel writing.

The four remaining essays in this first section uncover the different political, commercial, aesthetic, and ethnographic imperatives that combined to link domestic travel writing to American national identity. Three iconic sites garner separate chapters that track changes in meaning over time. If the Niagara had been transformed, by the mid-nineteenth century, as Christopher Mulvey demonstrates, from a site of aspiring development into a mandatory stop on the sublime-tourism circuit, Thomas Ruys Smith shows how the Mississippi became the symbol of a whole series of national associations, including the American frontier, American slavery, and the American dream of escape. The Southwest, as Martin Padget shows, drew the varied attention of explorers, ethnographers, tourists, and expatriates who reveled in the “exoticism” of the region's environment and peoples. Finally, William W. Stowe examines a handful of travelers who used the American landscape to forge personal and national identities and to capture its scientific and metaphysical meanings. He plays with Emerson's claims in Nature that while a given individual might own this or that plot of land, those of poetic sensibility alone enjoyed “property in the horizon,” as their integrative vision “created meaningful landscapes from the welter of facts and impressions that make up the American scene” (27).

If the physical and figurative exploration of American spaces has been a crucial source of Americans’ self-conception, an equally powerful source has been the encounter with foreign lands, for “American identity,” as the editors assert, “is defined by contact with other people and other places” (5). More than any other place, Europe, and especially England, attracted the attention of nineteenth-century travel writers and, accordingly, European travel writing receives treatment in two separate essays. Alfred Bendixen explores how early American writers found European travel at once “attractive and dangerous” (103). This contradictory and ambivalent stance toward Europe marked the works of most writers, from Royall Tyler to Mark Twain. Bendixen offers a compelling discussion of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book, reading its focus on “ruined castles” and other evidence of historical decay as part of a larger meditation on mutability. Such a theme appealed to American travelers because it could establish their refined sensibilities but also assure them that America's achievements were still to come. Apart from Cooper, Emerson, and Hawthorne, Bendixen also draws our attention to lesser-known writers such as Henry T. Tuckerman (“largely and unjustly forgotten”) and James Jackson Jarves (“probably the finest American travel writer of the mid-nineteenth century”), as well as the enslaved African American David F. Dorr, whose “completely unconventional” 1858 A Colored Man round the World combined attacks on racial injustice with observations on the “exotic and erotic” in France and the Middle East (111, 115, 121).

If, in the first six decades of the nineteenth century, writing about Europe betrayed the tension of balancing cultural appreciation with democratic affirmation, that nationalistic anxiety eased in the decades after the Civil War. William Merrill Decker's essay moves from the postbellum era to our own day and identifies how the changing nature of the Euro-American relationship gave rise to new discursive frameworks within which American travelers wrote. Gilded Age aesthetes like Henry James and Edith Wharton—distinguishing themselves from what Wharton called the “tourists and Baedekers” increasingly taking advantage of less expensive, quicker steamship travel to Europe—reveled in the “visual consumption of beauty” largely free of the anxiety many of their predecessors exhibited. Jack London's work of “literary sociology” People of the Abyss (1903), an exploration of the squalor and wretchedness of London's East End, garners one brief paragraph, but makes the reader long for fuller treatment of the reformer's version of the Grand Tour, which took Americans to Dickensian slums and models of Victorian uplift such as Toynbee Hall.

The twentieth-century world wars lent new structures to American ways of seeing Europe, transforming the continent from the “site of a museum past” to a “field of carnage” in the American imagination. Likewise postwar American travelers could no longer remain the “innocents” of Twain's day, but might find themselves cast as “saviors” or, later, as “inadvertent emissaries of a hegemonic power” (127). Decker offers here a compelling juxtaposition of the ecstatic Henry Miller and the academic F. O. Matthiessen who, for all their “temperamental contrast,” shared a Whitmanesque vision of democratic brotherhood as America's possible contribution to the world (137). In post-Cold War memoirs, as well as novels, Europe assumed new form as the site of Jewish historical memory and ethnic conflict.

While European travel drew out nationalist ambivalence in the nineteenth century, travel to other parts of the world was structured by different historical and cultural dynamics and accordingly elicited a different set of responses. In his fascinating essay on “America in the Holy Land, Israel, and Palestine,” Hilton Obenzinger reveals the direct national stake many religious travelers felt in the Holy Land. Linking the fate of Israel with that of the New Israel in North America, these ministers and other writers sought typological reassurance in Jewish restoration. Yet the nonbiblical historical reality of the place often disconcerted white Protestant Americans who found themselves uneasy in the face of a whole variety of Others: Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Arab, Muslim. The “disgust” conveyed in George William Curtis's response of 1852 was typical:

The unequal relationship of the US with its neighbors in Latin and South America and with the Pacific islands it would eventually occupy gave a distinctive ideological caste to narratives produced from travel to those sites. Christopher McBride's essay “America in the Larger World: Beyond the Pacific Coast” argues that South Pacific writings by Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Jack London demonstrate the “power travel literature has to reflect and influence American culture,” by, for example, asserting a “literary colonization” of the Hawaiian Islands before the commercial and geopolitical one (174). According to McBride, “imperialism”—a process more taken for granted than defined here—allowed “the nation,” presumably through its writers, to articulate anxieties about racial difference safely “on foreign soil, away from the attendant cultural difficulties that would arise in works set at home.” This argument might work better if Twain had not tackled questions of race as well as American imperial power directly in his domestic writings (177). McBride makes the volume's only detour into the Caribbean, through a reading of Richard Henry Dana's 1859 To Cuba and Back, and here betrays an unfortunate tendency toward oversimplification. McBride laments the clear racism that marked Dana's treatment of all sectors of the Cuban population and faults him for failing to use the opportunity to espouse his supposed antislavery principles. Yet McBride's facile reading neglects the critical thrust of Dana's commentary on the greater freedom enjoyed by free blacks in Cuba than in the United States. It also misses Dana's unmistakeably pointed claim (the year before the Republican Party's first national victory) that the slave in Cuba “benefits from the division in power and property between the two rival and even hostile races of whites, the Creoles and the Spaniards,” only one of which held slaves.Footnote ⁴

Ignorance and condescension have marked American attitudes toward Latin America in general, and the relations between the United States and its southern neighbors have been structured by strong commercial, imperial, and tourist imperatives. Yet Terry Caesar's essay “South of the Border: American Travel Writing in Latin America” explores how the very force of those structuring imperatives could generate a compelling counterforce in the desire and willingness on the part of recent writers directly to engage, challenge, and play with “the discursive circumstances” in which they find themselves. Tracing American journeys outside Europe gives texture and dimension to what has, since at least the novels of Henry James, been a familiar Euro-American narrative. Yet one wonders how the editors decided which parts of the world merited inclusion. There is no discussion here of Asia: not of China, Japan, India, or Vietnam. Perhaps this omission reflects a reluctance to take the narratives of missionaries and soldiers seriously as travel writings, though such sources would undoubtedly yield instructive insights into the very question of national identity with which the authors are fundamentally concerned.

Several essays examine African American travelers, who in many ways elucidate the larger American narrative but in others require special treatment. As Virginia Whatley Smith explains, African American travel writing originated from a unique experience: the dehumanizing captivity and involuntary migration of enslaved Africans. Thus the first African American travel narratives were also slave narratives, which were often, as Smith writes, “sociopolitically motivated on behalf of the collective for racial uplift rather than for mere individualized, European-type, leisure class entertainment” (197). Smith draws perhaps too sharp a distinction on this point and neglects the elevating project of national self-culture on which many white travelers studiously embarked. Yet the distinctiveness of the African American experience continued to mark the travel writings of even those who traveled without coercion and in relative comfort. This dynamic emerges most clearly in texts about Africa, in which writers from Alexander Crummel to W. E. B. Du Bois grapple with complex feelings of loss, rupture, and homecoming. The nature of the home black writers left behind also shaped their travel narratives. Traveling to Moscow in the heady days of the 1920s and early 1930s, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes offered stinging commentary on Jim Crow America by emphasizing the comparatively warm welcome black travelers might find in red Russia.

Even when African Americans traveled to Europe, their historical situation differed widely enough from white readers to produce fresh, at times jarring, insights. James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son used his travel in Paris and Switzerland to stage his powerful meditation on race, national identity, and history. Decker's brief discussion of Baldwin's “Stranger in the Village,” with its poignant exploration of the gargoyles at Chartres Cathedral, makes clear that Europe did not mean one thing to all Americans. Yet what about travel at home? Though the burdens of American history haunt the national landscape—the route to Canada, the border between slavery and freedom, the slave market that was New Orleans—African American journeys through the American countryside receive curiously little attention throughout the volume.

Women's travel writing appears sporadically across the essays, but it too receives treatment in its own separate essay. Susan L. Roberson begins by highlighting the greater mobility traditionally afforded (white) men in American history and the way that gender difference has shaped travel writing: “our heroes,” she writes, “are the explorers and restless souls whose tales of new lands, adventures, freedom and opportunity form a part of the national myth” (214). Yet just like their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, women have emigrated, fled captivity, moved west, and made the Grand Tour. Their writing does, however, bear some telling differences from men's narratives, according to Roberson. These include descriptions of their efforts to preserve domestic order amidst the chaos of travel and greater attention to the domestic scenes (homes, child-rearing, food, and sexual arrangements) they witnessed on their journeys. The sexual vulnerability of women travelers also stands out. As one twentieth-century anthology summed it up, “A man alone is a man alone; a woman alone is odd at best, easy prey at worst” (223). Indeed, “the majority of women who wrote up their travel accounts,” Roberson writes, did not travel alone but, like Julia Ward Howe, in the company of others, “most often their husbands” (224). Divisions along class lines were marked. Overwhelmingly, it was educated middle-class traveling women, such as Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Margaret Fuller, notwithstanding the latter's frequent impoverishment in Italy, who wrote professionally for publication. Further, women outside the confining privileges of middle-class respectability were always at greater risk not just of being sexually assaulted but of being sexually demonized as well.

The final essay in the book, “Driving That Highway to Consciousness: Late Twentieth-Century American Travel Literature,” brings the story up to our own day, as the communal travel of wagons, coaches, boats, trains, and buses of yore gave way to the “solitary euphoria” of automobile travel. Deborah Paes de Barros considers how this technological transformation reinforced but also facilitated a cultural one: the aesthetic longing for self-expression. In the work of writers as varied as Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe, and William Least Heat-Moon, travel literature became explicitly the literature of self-discovery, although with a hallucinogenic high jinks and consciousness-probing as far removed from Thoreau's experiential spiritual seeking as Route 66 was from Walden. Does airplane travel in the twenty-first century—with its heterogeneous social encounters and its physical and psychic discomfort—return us to a mode of travel more closely resembling that of the nineteenth century? The topic awaits a future historian.

The thread that connects all these essays is an insistence on a crucial connection between travel and identity in all its manifestations. Travel writers are said to perform their identities according to the obvious social categories of class, race, and gender, but also in terms of other less-familiar classifications such as the “gentleman scientist,” the “authentic” shanty-boater, or the third-generation Holocaust survivor. The heaviest emphasis falls on questions of national identity: who is and what does it mean to be an American. The contours of the connection between travel and identity are never precisely drawn; at different points travel writing appears to discover, enable, construct, constitute, resist, or police the boundaries of “Americanness.” The imprecision stems as much from the shifting meaning of that very category over time as from the inexact nature of literary interpretation.

Other compelling themes emerge across the volume, including the way travel writing has provided a platform for cultural criticism, a medium that enabled “authors to articulate a set of literary values and aspirations,” in Alfred Bendixen's words (109). These aspirations varied by author and time period. When Washington Irving praised American visitors to Westminster Abbey for the greater reverence they showed memorials to poets than to military heroes, or when Henry Tuckerman imagined Italy as a poetic escape from the prosaic reality of America, they registered their anxieties about a national culture overly dedicated to the pursuit of material gain. The Paris expatriates and, later, Henry Miller used their descriptions of bohemian or erotic European life to reject the conformity and narrow-mindedness they saw afflicting America in the interwar years.

An intensely popular genre, especially in the nineteenth century, where it became nearly compulsory for all aspiring authors, travel writing often confronted the would-be chronicler with a self-conscious anxiety of influence. Because the genre was so well established and the familiar travel routes so well paved, writers strained for freshness and originality. Cliché and conventionality ran rampant. Longfellow modeled his 1835 Outre-Mer on Irving's The Sketch Book, and the “self-consciously literary and artificial” book, according to Bendixen, revealed none of the liveliness and warmth of Longfellow's less-studied letters home (110). The problem actually preceded the writing, as travelers struggled to see a place afresh with their own eyes. The “vast library” of earlier books, as Obenzinger shows in his essay on the Holy Land, created a “thick textual lens” through which even the clearest-eyed traveler had difficulty seeing. Mulvey shows how Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James strained against literary convention and cliché in their writings about Niagara. Yet the very pervasiveness and familiarity of convention gave twentieth-century writers an attractive rhetorical structure against which they could counterpose their own, as Caesar's essay on South America demonstrates.

Mark Twain tackled the issue of literary convention head-on in his 1869 The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim's Progress, “perhaps the most popular travel book in American literature,” according to Obenzinger (146). Mocking the whole “business of sight-seeing,” including travel guides, Twain claimed to be able to predict precisely what his fellow tourists in Europe and the Holy Land would say at any given site because he had the books from which they would “‘smouch’ their ideas.” Thus Twain's iconoclastic narrative depended for its very power on his readers’ familiarity with earlier accounts, without which his deflating comments would lack punch. One of the ironies of Twain's success lay in the power of his text to shape subsequent American responses to the places he described. When President Grant traveled to the Holy Land in 1877–9, for example, he brought with him a Bible, a standard guide, and a copy of The Innocents Abroad. Like other Americans, Obenzinger claims, Grant came to visit certain sites because they had been the scenes of humorous Twain passages. The iconoclasm of Twain's account became a new version of conventionalism.

Collectively, the Cambridge essays offer a variety of nuanced readings and move beyond the at times overly stark ideological treatments of travel writing associated with postcolonial studies. But what is missing, or, better put, how might this volume have differed if its contributors had been historians? The most noticeable absence is any discussion of the publication history of the various texts or of the literary market for travel writing overall. The volume would have benefited from at least one essay detailing the basic facts of authorship, readership, and publication for travel writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Further, our understanding of individual travel narratives—and particularly how or even whether these texts helped construct or perform American identity—would have been enormously enhanced by some attention to how these texts were read and received by critics and ordinary readers alike. To return briefly to the case of Julia Ward Howe, any tendency we might have to treat her condescension toward her Cuban hosts as a stand-in for a general American attitude of national or racial superiority might be checked by reading the reviews. The Dial, for example, faulted her for “failing to get beyond the surly phase of a Cuban visit,” while Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine praised the book but observed that “its author sometimes views Cuban manners and customs through the spectacles of her national prejudice.” It is hard to know what larger cultural claims we can make for a text without some of this broader contextual work, which is ultimately also a problem for the second book under review.Footnote ⁵

If Bendixen and Decker agree that American writing about Europe in the late nineteenth century “reflected a greater cosmopolitanism, a greater openness to the possibility of foreign influence” (124), the story Mark Rennella tells in The Boston Cosmopolitans confirms this thesis. His book centers on a handful of writers and artists—all born in the generation before the Civil War—who, Rennella claims, translated their extensive international travel into an open, cosmopolitan frame of mind. Where the essays in the Cambridge volume insist that American travel writing shapes American identity, Rennella's book seeks to venture beyond the search for identity. He attempts to trace out the precise impact travel had on the work and thought of his figures. He seeks, first, to determine what travel meant to the “the Boston Cosmopolitans,” and, second, to document how they in turn influenced the larger culture of Boston and the United States. His focus thus extends from travel accounts (both published and private) to the novels, paintings, sculptures, and architecture that travelers went on to create.

The “Boston cosmopolitans” included, most centrally, the novelists William Dean Howells and Henry James, the philosopher William James, the painters John La Farge and Lilla Cabot Perry, the sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens, the architects Charles Follen McKim and H. H. Richardson, and the art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. That they were a cosmopolitan and well-traveled set of individuals can hardly be disputed. Many made multiple international trips; some, such as Henry James and Lilla Cabot Perry, lived abroad for extended stretches of times. Almost all learned to speak and write foreign languages. Rennella further presents some evidence that they embraced both international travel and foreign cultures with a genuine openness and interest not always found among other American travelers, both before and after them. Cabot Perry urged her daughter, when she traveled, to “try to plunge into the inner life of the country” (120), and this is exactly what Howells and James appear to have done in their Italian travel writings, Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Hours (1909), which reveled in the cultural, social, and even linguistic nuance of the place. Wishing to avoid exactly the sort of overinfluence that Twain's book mocked, La Farge refused to read travel narratives of Japan before traveling there so that he might see the country and its culture with fresh eyes.

While the name “Boston Cosmopolitans” may seem slightly misleading, as some of them only spent minimal time in the city, Rennella contends that the private travel experience of these figures culminated in the public spaces of Boston: the Shaw Memorial by Saint Gaudens, Trinity Church by Richardson (with interior contributions by La Farge), the Boston Public Library by McKim, and the evolving art collection that became the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In the second half of the book, Rennella reads these sites for the traces they bear of the Cosmopolitans’ travel-nurtured aesthetic.

This is an original and exciting claim. In theory it moves beyond the literary conventions, tropes, and rhetorical gestures that are the subject of so much literature-studies scholarship to ask about the larger historical significance of travel. Rennella proffers an answer to that question by linking the perspective-broadening, horizon-expanding experience of travel—of seeing different places and embracing different cultures—to cosmopolitanism. This term he initially defines, generally enough, as “the disposition to see one's native culture as just one branch of human culture in general” (2), but it gathers greater and more specific ideological weight as the book progresses. Thus at different points, cosmopolitanism comes to mean a critical stance toward American culture (Norton, the Jameses), an embrace of collaboration (Saint Gaudens, Richardson, McKim), a cultural eclecticism (Saint Gaudens, La Farge), an effort to transcend divisions of race (William James, Saint Gaudens) and class (McKim), open-ended aesthetic meaning (McKim, Gardner), and a commitment to the solidarity of humanity (Howells). The problem here is that these uses of “cosmopolitanism” continually outstrip the evidence presented and, as a result, appear more the product of Rennella's own twenty-first-century vision than of his nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figures’ experience. Indeed by the end of the book, cosmopolitanism seems like nothing more than a synonym for any progressive tendency of which Rennella approves.

To demonstrate the historical meanings of cosmopolitanism requires more careful and sustained empirical research than Rennella provides, as other recent works on the phenomenon demonstrate. Under the pressure of this sustained, historical inquiry, late nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism might appear less attractive than Rennella's version. Mona Domosh and Kristin Hoganson, for example, have recently demonstrated how cosmopolitanism can serve the interests of American corporations or middle-class consumers as much as progressive artists.Footnote ⁶ Especially for a dissertation-turned-first-book, the research in The Boston Cosmopolitans seems surprisingly thin in places. For example, Rennella offers an intriguing reading of La Farge's An Artist's Letters from Japan (1897), in which he claims that the artist taught his readers crucial lessons about the relationship between universalism and particularism and the inadequacy of translation. Yet Rennella presents no evidence beyond his own reading of this text to demonstrate either La Farge's intent or his audience's response. Discussions of the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, DC and the Shaw Memorial in Boston suffer from a similar dearth of primary-source evidence. What did the artists think about their works? How did reviewers, newspapers, and other commentators at the time respond to them? Was the cosmopolitan message these works sought to disseminate—and which Rennella claims was the impact his figures had on their culture—received or understood? When Rennella actually presents the kind of evidence that might answer these questions, the results are highly suggestive, as can be seen in his discussion of the newspaper response to the opening of the Boston Public Library, which supports his point about its democratic openness. But without this kind of empirical and contextual work, Rennella's understanding of cosmopolitanism comes across as highly subjective, a problem aggravated in the Afterword, where he attempts to draw out the relevance of turn-of-the-last-century cosmopolitanism for our own turn-of-the-century moment.

Further, he asserts more than demonstrates a connection between this cosmopolitanism and travel. For some figures the connection seems rather clear, and Rennella patiently shows us the impact travel had on the perspective and cultural assumptions of Norton, Howells, James, and Cabot Perry. Yet, for many other figures, he provides almost no biographical or intellectual context, which not only renders these figures vague and disembodied as historical actors, but also weakens the book's overall premise. So, for example, we learn next to nothing about the travel experience of Saint Gaudens, Richardson, Gardner, or McKim, even as their works are asked to carry the heaviest weight of the argument about the cultural impact of travel. They are the ones, Rennella claims, whose work brought back to Boston not simply “the physical artifacts and a heightened appreciation of foreign cultures” but “an enthusiastic desire to share the sense of wonder and discovery that they had felt on the [sic] own journeys abroad” (170). Since we learn almost nothing about those journeys abroad, this is a difficult claim to assess.

What at first seems like a curious imbalance in the book, where Charles Eliot Norton's 1873 return home earns a chapter all to itself but Isabella Stewart Gardner's travels receive barely a mention, becomes, on further reflection, an indication of how Rennella's book often conflates the two distinct topics of travel and cosmopolitanism. Not all travelers drew cosmopolitan lessons from their journeys, and surely it was possible for a cosmopolitan to become so without ever traveling. Beyond that, some of the most original interpretations in Rennella's book have to do with the intellectual impact of travel but not with cosmopolitanism, as when he examines Howells's thematic emphasis, in both novels and plays, on the “liminal space” of a domestic railway car. Here the focus is on the serendipity and creative dislocation that any kind of travel can engender, whether it occurs in Schenectady or Switzerland.

Had Rennella committed to this line of inquiry, instead of imposing an at times awkward and tendentious conception of cosmopolitanism onto his findings, The Boston Cosmopolitans might have pointed intellectual historians in fresh directions and encouraged them to grapple with the historical significance of travel as other historians have begun to do.Footnote ⁷ If literary scholars have demonstrated how travel, in Susan Roberson's words, “transforms the journeying self, unsettling a static identity with movement through space and contact with different people and places” (221), historians might further investigate what intellectual difference travel made. Frederick Douglass in Ireland, Jane Addams at a bullfight in Spain, Progressive housing reformers in Birmingham, James Baldwin in Paris, Julia Ward Howe in the Caribbean: evidence of the significance of travel for American writers, artists, and intellectuals is everywhere. In his effort to show more fully how a group of late nineteenth-century Bostonians sought to translate into works of art “the findings they made during their travels”—findings that included an appreciation of different lifestyles, the aesthetic pleasure of disorientation, an interest in history, and a critical perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of their home country—Rennella surveys a new terrain just waiting for historians to map, explore, and narrate.