Daniel Kilbride has assembled a remarkable collection of primary sources to document the experiences of American travelers in Europe from the late colonial period to the eve of the Civil War. He delves deeply into journals, correspondence, and newspaper and magazine articles written by men – and a few women – whose names are now unfamiliar even to specialists, even though the mere fact that they were able to travel to Europe testified to their wealth and social prominence. Kilbride deliberately eschews the travel writings of such famous figures as Thomas Jefferson or Ralph Waldo Emerson, and instead attempts to paint a collective portrait of a small and unrepresentative, but in his view disproportionately influential, group. His main interest is how the accounts of these travelers reflected and affected the evolution of an American national identity. For over a century, Americans abroad wrestled with their conflicting desires, on the one hand, to see the United States as a distinct and even exceptional nation, defined as everything Europe was not, and, on the other hand, to regard America as an equal to the time-honored civilizations of the Old World, despite nagging feelings of inferiority. Along the way, the book charts the development of overseas travel from an elite rite of passage to a middle-class pastime, as steamships, guidebooks, hotels, and banks turned travel into a commodity.

The book is thoroughly researched and clearly written, but its broad scope ends up flattening the experiences of its subjects. Instead of focussing, for instance, on particular times and places, Kilbride covers over a hundred years of American and European history in about 170 pages of text. (This approach assumes familiarity with a wide historical background, which might limit the book's suitability for undergraduate classes.) The four chapters, which each cover between twenty and thirty years, are all organized thematically around four subjects: American travelers’ deeply conflicted feelings toward the former mother country, Great Britain; their largely hostile attitudes toward Catholicism on the Continent; their fascination with and contempt for European aristocracy and nobility; and their reactions to the extremes of luxury and poverty, from which many believed the United States to be exempt. These themes are familiar to all students of European–American interactions. Because Kilbride has so much ground to cover, he uses quotes from the travelers’ writings as illustrations for generalized points made about these themes, often without noting when or in what context these statements were made. For example, two quotes, one from James West and the other from John Brown Cutting, are put side by side in the same paragraph to exemplify post-Revolutionary American Anglophobia. But the footnote indicates that the first quote dates from 1810 and the second from 1790 and that they are thus separated by two very tumultuous decades in Anglo-American relations (48–49). Kilbride clearly aims to present a synthesis of the American experience in Europe, but this comes at the price of neglecting the specificity of the locale and historical moment that inspired each traveler's account.

The reader also gets little sense of the travelers as individuals. This becomes problematic, because Kilbride repeatedly makes very strong claims about their influence on fellow Americans at home. The travelers are said to have “led Americans to define an identity vis-à-vis Europe” and to have “forced Americans to confront and accept their transnational position” (both quotes at 46; italics mine). But we know very little about how the travelers and their writings were received in the United States. What were the intended audiences of their various reports? Were their journals private, perhaps made for posterity? Were their letters for the eyes of family and friends only, or addressed to a wider public? What role, if any, did the travelers play in American public life after their return?

All the evidence presented suggests that the travelers shared rather than shaped the attitudes of most of their compatriots toward Europe. Only in the final chapter, in one of the strongest passages of the book, do we get a glimpse of a transatlantic conversation, as black and white abolitionists abroad argued with their allies and adversaries at home. Kilbride's book comes up against the dilemma of many works in Atlantic and transnational history published over the last decade, namely to explain how Americans’ experiences in other parts of the world provide a new perspective on the so-called domestic history of the United States. Even as Being American in Europe falls short of that ambition, it does contain a wealth of material that opens avenues for further research.