TRAVEL JOURNALISM
Travel and travel accounts began with the first Americans.
Native Americans recorded their many trips in oral and
pictographic ways, a way of communication revived and
expanded in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by
means of photography, radio, and television. Travel narratives often framed oral legends that sought to explain origins, as in the case of a trip down the Colorado River by a
young Hopi Indian to find a bride and through that marriage
introduce to his people the Snake clan. Europeans brought
with them written language. Through it they produced narratives of exploring expeditions. Later, Europeans often
submitted reports in the form of diaries or travel accounts
in an effort to describe the land and its inhabitants to prospective settlers or investors or to summarize diplomatic
missions to Native American groups.
The Nineteenth Century: Reading,
Writing, and Travel
A major culture of reading, writing, and travel emerged in
the nineteenth century. The writer and critic H.T. Tuckerman observed in 1868 that “if the social history of the world
is ever written, the era in which we live will be called the
nomadic period.” He cited the advent of ocean steam navigation, the railway, electricity, and the telegraph as innovations that encouraged writing and reading about travel and
travel itself. He also included as encouragements leisure
and money. “When we analyze the motives of our American nomadic tribe, we find, first of all, that many of the
individuals thereof have made money, and naturally wish
to enjoy it.”
Newspapers and periodical publications formed part
of this culture and endeavored to help people decide the
great question, as Tuckerman put it: “To go or not to go.”
Monthly publications included articles and essays on foreign travel and places, and they published copious excerpts
from travel books, almost two thousand of which were
published, according to William Stone, before 1900. The
first issue of North American Review (1815) contained an
article on Paris and the French, and Scribner’s Monthly
ran a series of articles on a number of European cities later
in the century. New England Magazine and American
Monthly Magazine offered their readers travel sketches
written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Editor for fifteen years
at the Atlantic Monthly, novelist William Dean Howells,
traveled to Europe and wrote about his time there in Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867). Beginning in
1870, the Nation and Atlantic Monthly published some of
the first travel sketches of Henry James. He followed these
with book-length travel accounts and in 1907 published
what some regard as his most remarkable travel book, An
American Scene, composed after a long absence from the
United States.
Newspapers employed writers to travel and to publish.
The New York Tribune, a paper founded by Horace Greeley, joined the Saturday Evening Post to encourage Bayard
Taylor to go to Europe. Greeley asked Taylor to send back
sketches of German life and society. Editor of the transcendentalist journal Dial, Margaret Fuller, traveled in
Europe and published letters and pieces in the Tribune,
many of them recounting events associated with the 1848
revolutions. In the early 1850s, the California newspaper
Alta California told Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) to go
to Europe and compose travel letters “‘on such subjects
and from such places as will best suit him.’” He set sail on
board The Quaker City with other “pilgrims,” as he called
them, and produced accounts of the trip that enabled him
to hone his skills as an entertaining, satiric but insightful
observer of people and their ways. Ultimately these pieces
became part of The Innocents Abroad, the first of five travel
books he wrote. Greeley himself went to Europe and wrote
a series of letters addressed to the “reading class.” He published them as a book, Glances at Europe (1851). He also
went west and recounted his experiences in articles and eventually a book, Overland Journey from New York to San
Francisco (1860).
The Twentieth Century and Beyond:
Mass Travel and Travel Journalism
Rapid demographic and economic growth continued
throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth
and with it the transformation of travel into mass tourism. Many more people had wealth and leisure to spend on
travel. New ways of getting about—the automobile and the
airplane—became available. To serve and shape this group,
a tourist industry took form. In the 1840s, the Englishman
Thomas Cook set an example to be followed elsewhere. He
saw potential in the new railroads and began to organize
large group tours. He ran an excursion train from Leicester
to Loughborough in England on July 5, 1841, a distance of
twelve miles. Five hundred seventy people took part. Cook
then went on to make a business of travel as a travel agent
and author of guidebooks.
Less sophisticated magazines and newspapers than some
of those mentioned above played a major role in the creation
of a national mass culture for travel and leisure activity in
the United States. Beginning in the 1880s, magazines such
as Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, McClure’s, and
Collier’s joined the Saturday Evening Post, which had been
in existence since 1821, to play an important role in shaping
this culture. Innovative publishing technologies and aggressive marketing strategies undertaken by such people as the
publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer
made the newspaper the journalistic counterpart of F. W.
Woolworth’s “Five and Ten Cent Store.” These publications
made travel an important part of their content.
Magazines devoted exclusively to travel began to appear.
Of these, the National Geographic became the best known
and most successful. Beginning in 1888 as a scientific journal with limited appeal, it quickly abandoned that format
to become a glossy publication with a reputation for being
impartial and genteel, occupying, “a space between science
and entertainment” (Lutz and Collins 1993) and appealing
to Americans increased interest in the larger world after
the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of new territorial possessions. It took advantage of new photoengraving technology to make vivid photos its principal appeal
to a mass audience. Its first photos appeared in 1896, and
in 1905 it published photographs of the forbidden city of
Lhasa, Tibet. Its first nature photographs appeared in 1926,
introducing a dimension to the magazine that became a
more important focus in the last quarter of the century as
people became more aware of threats to the health of the
planet. In 1984, it launched a new magazine, the National
Geographic Traveler, designed to encourage readers, in
the words of the editor of National Geographic, Gilbert
Grovesner, “to go and experience first hand” what before
they might only have read about in the pages of the Geographic. National Geographic found the moving pictorial
images of television congenial as a way to augment its reach
through a series of programs for that medium.
Mass media complemented mass tourism. Newspapers began to include travel sections, and the larger ones
made use of many people to provide articles. The advent
of the automobile brought about organizations such as
the American Automobile Association and such publications as Westways, which began describing itineraries and
advocating better roads in the first decade of the twentieth
century. Before 1945, magazines ran advertisements for
popular car models that stressed the delights of a weekend or Sunday motor excursion into the country at a time
before the car culture transformed—in the words of James
Kunstler—much of the American landscape into “a geography of nowhere.” A plethora of travel magazines entered
the market with such names as Holiday, Travel & Leisure,
Trailer Travel to appeal to this culture and even suggest
other types of journeys. Magazines such as Arizona Highways and Nevada Magazine appeared to promote travel
in particular states. As travel and tourism expanded,
especially after World War II, some newspapers—particularly in the West—and regional publications such as
High Country News and Northern Lights began to discuss
issues related to tourism: its potential as an alternative
to environmentally damaging extractive industries, as a
threat to the environment itself if not carefully managed,
or as a kind of “devil’s bargain,” a selling of place, history,
and cultural identity in exchange for seasonal low-wage
employment.
Beginning in the 1920s, radio and television offered
themselves as new means for people to access information
and diversion. Both produced notable travel personalities
and journalists. Perhaps the most successful of these was the
radio personality, Lowell Thomas, Jr. Before his long radio
career, Thomas had established a reputation as both a world
traveler and an effective speaker. While in the Middle East
he had met Thomas Edward Lawrence and won his confidence. His talks about those experiences in such places as
the Royal Albert Hall in London attracted large audiences.
William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System took
note and in 1931 asked Thomas to talk extemporaneously
for fifteen minutes in front of a microphone. Thomas proceeded to talk about his experiences in India, about pygmies in Malaya, and mysterious ceremonies in Afghanistan.
His performance impressed Paley, who offered him a job.
Thus began “the longest continual daily broadcast in the
history of radio,” according to Norman Bowen. Thomas’s
programs mixed news and travel and were transmitted from
mountain tops, the depths of salt mines, from ships at sea,
and from airplanes. A highlight of his radio career came in
the 1950s when he traveled to what had been the forbidden
land of Tibet in response to an invitation from its government then feeling threatened by China. On the occasion of
a dinner in his honor in 1965, Walter Cronkite, the event’s
chair, read a letter from former President Harry Truman in
which Truman dubbed Thomas “the Methuselah of radio
broadcasts.”
Few, if any, television personalities could match Thomas’
range and influence. One person who came close was Charles
Kuralt, whose “On the Road” program had a lengthy career and represents some of the best that television came to offer
in the way of informational travel journalism. Kuralt developed in-depth television essays on people and places he
found interesting and representative of a certain diversity
in America at a time of growing homogenization of both
landscape and culture. Pictures and the spoken word made
up these essays, but Kuralt decided to write a book about
these travels, for as he put it “television journalism is no
field to enter if you have intimations of immortality; one’s
best work vanishes at the speed of light, literally.”
Television expanded to include cable, with channels
numbering in the hundreds and including some devoted
exclusively to travel. The 1990s saw the addition of the
computer as a standard household fixture and with it access
to the Internet which increasingly became one of if not the
principal ways people accessed information and ideas. With
expanding numbers of cable channels and the spread of the
Internet, a form of niche journalism devoted to travel also
grew. While some commentators concluded that the rapid
developments communication and transportation had made
the world one neighborhood, other writers such as the historian Paul Fussel concluded that not all these changes were
for the good and that by the late twentieth century, travel in
the old sense of the word had become impossible.
After World War II, at least two organizations came into
existence to further the professional development of travel
journalists and engage issues related to their work and their
subject. In the 1956, a Society of American Travel Journalists formed and now numbers over thirteen hundred. It
sponsors annual “Lowell Thomas Awards” for distinguished
travel writing and coverage. In 1991, two New Jersey travel
writers, Bob Nesoff and Dan Schossberg, established the
North American Travel Journalists Association. It aimed to
promote the professional development of members, which
within ten years numbered about five hundred, and to meet
the demands of the travel industry. It held annual meetings,
sponsored an annual travel journalist’s competition, and
published, with MSNBC Travel, Travelworld Magazine.
Further Reading
Barnes, Trevor J., and James S. Duncan, eds. Writing Worlds:
Discourse, Text, and Metaphor in the Representation of
Landscape. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
Bowen, Norman R., ed. Lowell Thomas: The Stranger Everyone Knows. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
1968.
Cole, Garold L. Travels in America From the Voyages of Discovery to the Present: An Annotated Bibliography of Travel
Articles in Periodicals, 1955—1980.Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1984.
Dorson, Richard M. America Begins: Early American Writing.
New York: Pantheon, 1950.
Dulles, Foster Rea. Americans Abroad: Two Centuries of European Travel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1964.
Edmonds, Margot, and Ella E. Clark. Voices of the Winds: Native
American Legends.New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1989.
Fussell, Paul, ed. The Norton Book of Travel. New York: Norton,
1987.
Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs, eds. The Cambridge Companion
to Travel Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2002.
Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise
and Fall of America’s Man-Made Landscape. New York:
Touchstone, 1993.
Kuralt, Charles. On the Road with Charles Kuralt. New York:
Putnam’s, 1985.
Lutz, Catherine A., and Jane L. Collins. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Norris, Scott, ed. Discovered Country: Tourism and Survival in
the West. Albuquerque: Stone Ladder Press, 1997.
Ohmann, Richard. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and the
Class at the Turn of the Century. New York: Verso, 1996.
Rothman, Hal K. Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the TwentiethCentury American West. Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1998.
Tuckerman, H. T. America and her Commentators. With a Critical Sketch of Travel in the United States. New York: Charles
Scribner. 1864.
——. “Going Abroad.” Putnam’s Magazine (Jan.–June 1869),
530–538.
Warhus, Mark. Another America: Native American Maps and the
History of Our Land.New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Ziff, Larzer. Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing,
1780–1910. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Charles A. Weeks