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In Securing Paradise, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez shows how tourism and militarism have functioned together in Hawai`i and the Philippines, jointly empowering the United States to assert its geostrategic and economic interests in the Pacific. She does so by interpreting fiction, closely examining colonial and military construction projects, and delving into present-day tourist practices, spaces, and narratives. For instance, in both Hawai`i and the Philippines, U.S. military modes of mobility, control, and surveillance enable scenic tourist byways. Past and present U.S. military posts, such as the Clark and Subic Bases and the Pearl Harbor complex, have been reincarnated as destinations for tourists interested in World War II. The history of the U.S. military is foundational to tourist itineraries and imaginations in such sites. At the same time, U.S. military dominance is reinforced by the logics and practices of mobility and consumption underlying modern tourism. Working in tandem, militarism and tourism produce gendered structures of feeling and formations of knowledge. These become routinized into everyday life in Hawai`i and the Philippines, inculcating U.S. imperialism in the Pacific.

For centuries, France has cast an extraordinary spell on travelers. Harvey Levenstein's Seductive Journey explains why so many Americans have visited it, and tells, in colorful detail, what they did when they got there. The result is a highly entertaining examination of the transformation of American attitudes toward French food, sex, and culture, as well as an absorbing exploration of changing notions of class, gender, race, and nationality.

Levenstein begins in 1786, when Thomas Jefferson instructed young upper-class American men to travel overseas for self-improvement rather than debauchery. Inspired by these sentiments, many men crossed the Atlantic to develop "taste" and refinement. However, the introduction of the transatlantic steamship in the mid-nineteenth century opened France to people further down the class ladder. As the upper class distanced themselves from the lower-class travelers, tourism in search of culture gave way to the tourism of "conspicuous leisure," sex, and sensuality. Cultural tourism became identified with social-climbing upper-middle-class women. In the 1920s, prohibition in America and a new middle class intent on "having fun" helped make drunken sprees in Paris more enticing than trudging through the Louvre. Bitter outbursts of French anti-Americanism failed to jolt the American ideal of a sensual, happy-go-lucky France, full of joie de vivre. It remained Americans' favorite overseas destination.

From Fragonard to foie gras, the delicious details of this story of how American visitors to France responded to changing notions of leisure and blazed the trail for modern mass tourism makes for delightful, thought-provoking reading.

"...a thoroughly readable and highly likable book."—Deirdre Blair, New York Times Book Review

Modern tourism in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas is concentrated around the area’s glistening man-made lakes, its fish-filled streams and rivers, and the entertainment mecca of Branson. But recreational excursions into this part of the country began over one hundred years ago as urban Midwesterners, many of them captivated by Harold Bell Wright’s novel The Shepherd of the Hills, sought the outdoors for spiritual and physical regeneration.

Morrow and Myers-Phinney excavate the beginnings of commercial tourism in the region and follow it through six decades as the influx of visitors who became familiar with the Ozarks and its investment opportunities brought capital, new commerce, and additional residents to the hills. Chapters focus on float fishing, game parks, cave exploration, the influence of the railroad, and the men who were instrumental in the region’s transformation. The authors discuss traditional lifestyles rooted in “living off the land,” with stock raising and lumbering providing basic subsistence, and changes wrought by tourism, which affected all classes of people across the White River landscape. They describe the flowering of “Ozarks folklore”—how stories told around gravel-bar fishing camps and retold by newspaper journalists translated the hills’ oral tradition for mass audiences.

While the main theme of this study is the development of tourism, it is also a social history of the interior highlands of the Ozarks. We see how the residents and their way of life were discovered, exploited, and changed by new opportunities and the demands of tourism and increasing trade. As such, this book is a valuable new addition to the University of Arkansas Press’s Ozarks Collection.

The contributors to Sounds of Vacation examine the commodification of music and sound at popular vacation destinations throughout the Caribbean in order to tease out the relationships between political economy, hospitality, and the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Drawing on case studies from Barbados, the Bahamas, Guadeloupe, Saint Martin, and Saint Lucia, the contributors point to the myriad ways live performances, programmed music, and the sonic environment heighten tourists' pleasurable vacation experience. They explore, among other topics, issues of authenticity in Bahamian music; efforts to give tourists in Barbados peace and quiet at a former site of colonial violence; and how resort soundscapes extend beyond music to encompass the speech accents of local residents. Through interviews with resort managers, musicians, and hospitality workers, the contributors also outline the social, political, and economic pressures and interests that affect musical labor and the social encounters of musical production. In so doing, they prompt a rethinking of how to account for music and sound's resonances in postcolonial spaces.

Contributors. Jerome Camal, Steven Feld, Francio Guadeloupe, Jocelyne Guilbault, Jordi Halfman, Susan Harewood, Percy C. Hintzen, Timothy Rommen

The first collection of its kind to examine tourism as a complicated and vital force in southern history, culture, and economics

Anyone who has seen Rock City, wandered the grounds of Graceland, hiked in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, or watched the mermaids swim at Weeki Wachee knows the southern United States offers visitors a rich variety of scenic, cultural, and leisure activities. Tourism has been, and is still, one of the most powerful economic forces in the modern South. It is a multibillion-dollar industry that creates jobs and generates revenue while drawing visitors from around the world to enjoy the region’s natural and man-made attractions.
 
This collection of 11 essays explores tourism as a defining force in southern history by focusing on particular influences and localities. Alecia Long examines sex as a fundamental component of tourism in New Orleans in the early 20th century, while Brooks Blevins describes how tourism served as a modernizing influence on the Arkansas Ozarks, even as the region promoted itself as a land of quaint, primitive hillbillies. Anne Whisnant chronicles the battle between North Carolina officials building the Blue Ridge Parkway and the owner of Little Switzerland, who fought for access and advertising along the scenic highway. One essay probes the racial politics behind the development of Hilton Head Island, while another looks at the growth of Florida's
panhandle into a “redneck Riviera,” catering principally to southerners, rather than northern tourists.
 
Southern Journeys is a pioneering work in southern history. It introduces a new window through which to view the region's distinctiveness. Scholars and students of environmental history, business history, labor history, and social history will all benefit from a consideration of the place of tourism in southern life.
 

From Shamu the dancing whale at Sea World to Hawaiian lu'au shows, Staging Tourism analyzes issues of performance in a wide range of tourist venues. Jane C. Desmond argues that the public display of bodies—how they look, what they do, where they do it, who watches, and under what conditions—is profoundly important in structuring identity categories of race, gender, and cultural affiliation. These fantastic spectacles of corporeality form the basis of hugely profitable tourist industries, which in turn form crucial arenas of public culture where embodied notions of identity are sold, enacted, and debated.

Gathering together written accounts, postcards, photographs, advertisements, films, and oral histories as well as her own interpretations of these displays, Desmond gives us a vibrant account of U.S. tourism in Waikiki from 1900 to the present. She then juxtaposes cultural tourism with "animal tourism" in the United States, which takes place at zoos, aquariums, and animal theme parks. In each case, Desmond argues, the relationship between the viewer and the viewed is ultimately based on concepts of physical difference harking back to the nineteenth century.

Singing was just one element of blues performance in the early twentieth century. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and other classic blues singers also tapped, joked, and flaunted extravagant costumes on tent show and black vaudeville stages. The press even described these women as "actresses" long before they achieved worldwide fame for their musical recordings. In Staging the Blues, Paige A. McGinley shows that even though folklorists, record producers, and festival promoters set the theatricality of early blues aside in favor of notions of authenticity, it remained creatively vibrant throughout the twentieth century. Highlighting performances by Rainey, Smith, Lead Belly, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee in small Mississippi towns, Harlem theaters, and the industrial British North, this pioneering study foregrounds virtuoso blues artists who used the conventions of the theater, including dance, comedy, and costume, to stage black mobility, to challenge narratives of racial authenticity, and to fight for racial and economic justice.