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U.S. Tourism, Memory, and Identity History 319/519
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J.
Mark Souther, Ph.D.
Syllabus (PDF)
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Tourism is one of the leading industries in the United States as well as an important leisure-time activity in which Americans engage the past and locate themselves in American society by viewing local and regional cultures that may differ from their own. The impulse to travel has built or reshaped cities and towns—Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Miami Beach, New Orleans, Niagara Falls, Santa Fe, and Williamsburg among them—and regions including the American Southwest, New England, and the Deep South. This course examines the role of tourism in American society and culture from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. It emphasizes how historical memory shapes tourist attractions and how tourism shapes local, regional, national, racial, and ethnic identity. We will examine Americans’ motives for choosing various destinations—retreat and spiritual uplift, health and recreation, historical understanding, celebration and commemoration, multicultural exoticism, and entertainment. We will also trace the development of numerous tourist destinations, including seaside and mountain resorts, national parks, natural springs, religious retreats, amusement parks and theme parks, battlefields, living history museums, preserved or reinvented historic sites, gambling and vice destinations, and urban entertainment districts. A
public history component of the course involves taking our understanding
of how tours guide tourists on scripted paths in cities and then developing
historical walking tours that interpret local history and the transformation
of urban space along and across Cleveland’s Euclid Corridor. Students
will receive training and field experience in visualizing the past through
the critical examination of historical images, as well as using oral histories.
The course project—part of a larger collaboration between the Cleveland
State University Department of History and Greater Cleveland Regional
Transit Authority, Cleveland Public Art, Cleveland Artists’ Consortium,
and ideastream™ (WCPN public radio and WVIZ public television) to
create a new sense of place along Euclid Avenue—will culminate in
student-created miniature tourist guidebooks combining images and interpretive
text to create a lively, engaging, historically grounded series of vignettes
about chosen sites. Photo courtesy of Cleveland State University Department of Special Collections
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