A Year of American Travel


Book Description

Writer, wife of famed explorer John C. Frémont, and political activist Jessie Benton Frémont was one of the most remarkable women of the 19th century. Closest aide and confidant to her ambitious husband, she penned this tale of her family's western migration. "I saw back into the time when I had learned to know how painful is the process of founding a new country. What loneliness, what privations, what trials of every kind, went to the first steps of even that rich and lovely country of California." It was not gold that drew Jessie Frémont to California in 1848. Gold had not yet been discovered when she left on her journey. The Frémonts were there to make a new life. When bad investments bankrupted the Frémonts, Jessie turned to writing to help support the family. Sharing her husband's anti-slavery feelings, she personally went to Abraham Lincoln to plead to restore her husband's position after he was dismissed for issuing an edict of emancipation in Missouri. She was helpful in getting protection for Yosemite Valley during the Lincoln administration. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE or download a sample.




A Year of American Travel


Book Description

Jessie Benton Frémont (1824-1902), the daughter of a Missouri Senator and wife of explorer John Charles Frémont, first came to California in 1849, when she and her young daughter spent six months at her husband's newly-acquired ranch at Mariposas, 140 miles east of San Francisco. The Frémonts also spent the years 1851-1852 and 1857-1861 at the Mariposas ranch before moving to St. Louis during the Civil War. They returned to California in 1887 and made Los Angeles their home for the rest of their lives. A year of American travel (1878) was written by Mrs. Frémont to earn badly-needed money for her family after her husband went bankrupt in 1873. Here she describes her first trip to California in 1849: the voyage and crossing at Chagres, life on the Mariposas ranch, visits to San José and Monterey, the life of women in California, the plight of the Mission Indians, the slavery controversy in the territory, and the Monterey Constitutional Convention of 1849. The book closes with the Frémonts' return to the East when Frémont assumed his seat in the U.S. Senate.







Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights


Book Description

Bloomberg • Best Nonfiction Books of 2020: "[A] tour de force." The basis of a major PBS documentary by Ric Burns, this “excellent history” (The New Yorker) reveals how the automobile fundamentally changed African American life. Driving While Black demonstrates that the car—the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility—has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Melding new archival research with her family’s story, Gretchen Sorin recovers a lost history, demonstrating how, when combined with black travel guides—including the famous Green Book—the automobile encouraged a new way of resisting oppression.




Here Lies America


Book Description

Here Lies America is a fast-paced, hilarious travel narrative in which Jason Cochran visits the major American tourism attractions that exist because something really horrible happened there. He romps through disaster zones, battlefields, terrorist attack sites--as long as it has a parking lot and a gift shop, he put it on the itinerary, no gravestone unturned. Along the way, he takes a look at the motivations of the people who installed the monuments, and when he pauses to seek the meaning behind the early demise of one of his own ancestors, he uncovers a tragic race-based murder plot that had been buried for a century. This is an American journey that could only be undertaken in our turbulent times, celebrating the absurd while surveying the country's teetering patriotic mythology from a healthy position on the margins. Jason chases newspaper clippings in dusty archives to inscriptions on rusty plaques to get to the truth, and in doing so, creates a moving miniature portrait of what it really means to be an American: what's "fact," what's "history," and what really matters.




The American Travel Promotion Act


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The Negro Motorist Green Book


Book Description

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.




American Travel Survey


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The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing


Book Description

Travel writing has always been intimately linked with the construction of American identity. Occupying the space between fact and fiction, it exposes cultural fault lines and reveals the changing desires and anxieties of both the traveller and the reading public. These specially-commissioned essays trace the journeys taken by writers from the pre-revolutionary period right up to the present. They examine a wide range of responses to the problems posed by landscapes found both at home and abroad, from the Mississippi and the Southwest to Europe and the Holy Land. Throughout, the contributors focus on the role played by travel writing in the definition and formulation of national identity, and consider the experiences of minority writers as well as canonical authors. This Companion forms an invaluable guide for students approaching this new, important and exciting subject for the first time.




The Best American Travel Writing 2016


Book Description

This collection gathers the best travel essays from The New Yorker, Harpers, GQ and more—featuring Paul Theroux, Alice Gregory, Dave Eggers and others. Why do I travel? Why does anyone of us travel? Bill Bryson poses these questions in his introduction to The Best American Travel Writing 2016, and though he admits, “I wasn’t at all sure I knew the answer,” these questions start us on the path of some fascinating explorations. While the various contributors to this collection travel for different reasons, they all come back with stories. Whether traversing the Arctic by dogsled, attending a surreal film festival in North Korea, or strolling the streets of a fast-changing Havana, some of today’s best travel writers share their experiences of the world and the human condition, offering, if not answers, than illumination and insight. The Best American Travel Writing 2016 includes Michael Chabon, William T. Vollmann, Helen Macdonald, Sara Corbett, Stephanie Pearson, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Pico Iyer, and others.