"

Chapter 1: History of Tourism

A parchment-color award celebrating the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The central image is a woman bridging the two seas on a podium labeled Panama: 1904-1915.
Figure 1.1 The United States of America Panama-Pacific International Exposition San Francisco, MCMXV. This certificate of award was bestowed on the Library of Congress in honor of the work it performed for the 1915 Exposition, which showcased the technological and agricultural prowess of the United States. Credit: Baldwin.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

—Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Overview

This chapter provides an historical narrative of the shift from the age of exploration to the age of tourism, ending with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which desegregated restaurants, hotels, and other tourist facilities in the United States. The chapter begins with an overview of the types of travel undertaken prior to tourism, including the European Grand Tour, which bridged travel and tourism. It then focuses on the United States to explore the development of transportation systems and tour guides and introduces key people who pioneered and promoted the nation’s tourist trade. It also examines the role of select tour guides in creating a national historical narrative. It delves into the United States National Park system and the transcontinental railroad companies, which formed the foundation of the country’s travel trade and worked to cohere a patriotic national identity following the Civil War. This chapter also traces the rise of the automobile and explores how the car shifted tourism from a nation-building venture to a celebration of individual freedom. Understanding the history of tourism is essential to a holistic understanding of today’s travel industry, as it illuminates the national, political, ideological, cultural, social, economic, and technological forces that have shaped the contemporary travel trade.

Objectives

Reading and reviewing this chapter will enable an attentive learner to accomplish the following tasks:

  1. Explain the motivations behind early travel and exploration
  2. Explain the purpose of the Grand Tour in early modern Europe
  3. Describe the shift in Western conceptions of nature and natural events that helped fuel nature travel and, eventually, nature tourism
  4. Articulate the role that the U.S. National Parks played in the development of tourism
  5. Discuss the foundational role that railroad companies played in the development of the U.S. tourism industry
  6. Examine the development of travel guide books, their disparate purposes, and their role in promoting tourism
  7. Analyze the role Harvey House restaurants and the women who staffed them played in aiding Westward Expansion
  8. Discuss the role mobility played in the Great Migration and the in the Civil Rights movement

Key Terms

  • American Guide Series
  • Chitlin’ Circuit
  • First Great Migration
  • Grand Tour
  • The Green Book
  • Harvey Girls
  • Harvey Houses
  • Jim Crow South
  • Manifest Destiny
  • The New Deal
  • Pullman workers
  • See America First series
  • The sublime
  • Sundown towns

Attributions

  1. Figure 1.1: The United States of America Panama-Pacific International Exposition San Francisco, MCMXV, by Baldwin, is available in the Public Domain.

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Introduction to Hospitality Copyright © by SBCTC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book