Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age

For Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age, author Harvey Levenstein--Emeritus professor of history at McMaster University--searched through scores of 18th- and 19th-century travel journals and unearthed numbers of insightful, entertaining, and, at times, extremely embarrassing accounts of Americans in France. Including the well-to-do cultural tourists of the late 1700s, the mid-1800s nouveaux riche recreational types, the "Leisure" travelers of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and finally the "doughboys" that descended on France from 1917 to 1930, Levenstein's intelligent examination of these groups and "the cultural history of going abroad" is an all together enjoyable read.