Planned serendipity: American travelers and the transatlantic voyage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In a 1903 biography of William Wetmore Story (1819-1895), an expatriate sculptor from Boston who lived most of his life in Italy, the author Henry James (1843-1916) commented on what he believed nineteenth-century American travelers abroad had contributed to the United States in the twentieth century: "The dawn of American consciousness of the complicated world." (1) Thirty years later growing numbers of Americans continued to make their own voyages across the Atlantic, and experienced their own "dawns of consciousness." Mount Holyoke College student Sarah (Sally) Johnston wrote to her family about her first sighting of Europe at dawn from aboard the SS Paris in 1938: "We got up about 4:30 a.m. and watched us come into Plymouth Harbor about 5:30 a.m.... We stayed up on deck for ages, freezing to death, but watching the sunrise come over the hills of the harbor.... It was very lovely and exciting, and in spite of being very cold the whole thing was well worth the lack of sleep." (2)

Unfortunately, that "dawn," until very recently, has remained largely obscured from the view of American historiography. One of the most enduring obstacles to appreciating and taking seriously the pleasures of travel, including the transatlantic voyage, is the habit of American exceptionalism--an age-old disposition to see America as a new, fresh, democratic and "reformed" alternative to the entrenched ways of an hierarchical, aristocratic, and corrupt "Old World." Some critics of exceptionalism have described it as virulently parochial: "the cognitive complement of an aggressive, implacable mode of collective [national] solidarity." (3) Although many Victorians like Henry James roundly criticized exceptionalism in private correspondence as well as in published writings, the exceptionalist position certainly gained a second wind after Americans' disappointment with World War I and its aftermath. Intellectual icons such as Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) sneered at the European interests of elite Victorians, condemning them for abandoning an "organic" American aesthetic--as if creativity could or should respect national boundaries. (4)

More recently, academics' distaste for the rich and/or intellectual Victorian elite in American history has perpetuated the obscuring of the history of foreign travel by Americans. Historians often took Victorian elites to task for leaving the United States for long periods of time, ignoring the fact that frequent travel offered fresh perspectives on their native country that would have been difficult to obtain if they had remained tethered to their native land. (5) Additionally, some scholars of European and American travel romanticized the early days of modern travel in the nineteenth century. According to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, as capitalism shaped the experience of larger numbers of travelers, travel abroad became less individualistic and more commodified and homogeneous. (6) Similarly, Paul Fussell, James Buzard, and Harvey Levenstein distinguish between travelers and tourists, indicating that the individualistic and original experience of elites who traveled independently was no longer possible sometime around the late nineteenth or early twentieth century when mass tourism rendered travel predictable, repetitive, uniform, and superficial. (7) Much scholarship on travel, in short, often interprets its history as one of decline and/or missed opportunities. (8)

However, recent interest in the forces of globalization has encouraged some historians to overcome barriers of exceptionalism and class prejudice and explore this era with new, exciting questions. (9) Some have gone so far as to insist upon the agency of travelers, including tourists, to make individual meaning out of travel, in spite of the power of capitalist imperatives, the packaging and routine of mass tourism, and the herding elements of high-speed land and air travel. Rudy Koshar in his recent book, Histories of Leisure, asserts that the unpredictability and variety of experiences associated with leisure travel make it historically inassimilable to one broad theory: "This ... is to be welcomed for it suggests that beneath it all there is still much room for individual initiative, for resistant or subversive practice, or simply for a degree of pleasure and self-satisfaction that can still not be tapped by projects of social domination--or by an overarching conceptual framework that finally does much violence to the historical actors and experiences it purports to illuminate." (10) We agree wholeheartedly with this refreshing argument concerning the possibilities opened through leisure travel, and we offer what even Koshar in a different work on German travel guidebooks does not; namely, travelers' own accounts of the unexpected delights and consternations of travel in the form of the Atlantic crossing. Additionally, while we accept William Stowe's formulation that travel offered Americans a "stage for independent self-definition," we find that the transatlantic ocean voyage presented new imaginative and creative possibilities, and led to a broader appreciation of nationalism and internationalism even before travelers reached their European destinations. (11)

This essay provides some of the first detailed evidence supporting the assertion that the act of travel itself--the ocean voyage, in this case--consistently offered the traveler (whether of the nineteenth or the twentieth centuries, or from the upper or middle classes) the opportunity to engage in a constructive questioning and self-examination of previously unquestioned beliefs and habits. (12) And by examining the different ways that individuals constructed the meaning of travel over time, the essay also incidentally sheds light on the empowering potential of travel to liberate the human imagination.

This study combines findings from seemingly incongruous sources--Henry James and his small but influential circle of elite artists and writers, and the college and university students of the pioneering junior year abroad programs that started in 1923--to make an important point. Despite their diverse class and regional backgrounds, and their many different goals for transatlantic travel, these American voyagers across the Atlantic shared a sense of wonder, dislocation, excitement, and anticipation during the week or weeks they spent at sea. The ocean voyage provided a long transition from home to destination, including freedom of the mind, if not the body, due to the unfamiliar, but not yet foreign, setting; meeting other Americans and Europeans; exposure to new foods and social practices. Travelers on board ships sailing from America were not yet foreigners, but they were definitely not at home. Many found the voyage stimulating, liberating, and exciting--a foretaste of the anticipated new sights, difficulties, pleasures, and inspirations of being in a foreign country. Transatlantic travel meant something different to different generations of Americans. Nineteenth-century elite travelers were more literary and more attuned to the intellectual and imaginative stimulation that ocean travel provided than were students. Students, by contrast, noted the more mundane pleasures of ocean liners. Yet for both cosmopolitan elites and students, the transatlantic voyage represented a "dawn of consciousness."

Many people who have commented on traveling have noticed in passing that, in traveling for an extended period of time on a ship, ocean voyagers enter a unique space. Melvin Maddocks has commented that in "Speeding between two worlds, the great liner became a third world in itself." (13) But few people have tried to make sense of this "world between worlds" and how it might affect those who enter it. One notable person who did spend some time analyzing and speculating on the impact of travel on human beings was George Santayana, a member of Harvard University's Department of Philosophy and a colleague of one of Henry James's brothers, William James.

In "The Philosophy of Travel," written around 1912 and posthumously published, Santayana considers the stimulating effects of travel, specifically ocean travel:

  In my own journeys, I have been enticed by romantic monuments and
  depth of historical interest rather than by geographical marvels; and
  yet what charm is equal to that of ports and ships and the thought of
  ceaseless comings and goings, by which our daily needs are supplied?
  The most prosaic objects, the most common people and incidents, seen
  as a panorama of ordered motions, of perpetual journeys by nights and
  day, through a hundred storms, over a thousand bridges and tunnels,
  take on an epic grandeur, and the mechanism moves so nimbly that it
  seems to live. It has the fascination, to me at least inexhaustible,
  of prows cleaving the water, wheels turning, planes ascending and
  descending the skies: things not alive in themselves but friendly to
  life, promising us security in motion, power in art, novelty in
  necessity. (14)

Such a philosophy of travel as essential to life, and the appreciation for ocean transport as "friendly to life" were probably possible only because steamships made the transatlantic passage so much more agreeable after the Civil War than it had been before.

During the Civil War, the need of the North to send military supplies to places as far apart as Washington and New Orleans, to move troops quickly from one battlefield to another, and to produce ever more deadly engines of war provided the impetus for rapid changes in travel technology and in the nation's infrastructure. After 1865 ships clad in iron and steel, following the prototype of the battleships Monitor and Merrimac developed to batter the fragile hulls of wooden sailing ships, grew in size, strength, and safety to transport ever-increasing numbers of goods, immigrants, and tourists between America and Europe, as well as other distant parts of the world. In the early 1870s leaders in the shipping industry, such as the Cunard Line, began to expand their passenger capacity significantly. (15) The increased demand for travel caused by rising immigration to America after the Civil War encouraged companies from all over the world to compete with the British Cunard Line steamers. The Holland America Line, the French Line, the Hamburg American Line, and the English White Star Line were just a few of the many transatlantic shipping companies that emerged after 1865. (16) With this competition prices for transatlantic travel fell steadily down-ward from the 1860s until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1860 the cost of first-class passage to cross to America from Britain was about [pounds sterling]17 ($76.50); in 1863 the one-way passage dropped to [pounds sterling]13; prices scraped bottom at [pounds sterling]9 in 1883. In 1890 prices recovered slightly to [pounds sterling]10 (about $45, or $41.28 in 1860s dollars). (17) For steerage passengers, prices were approximately one-half first class passage.

In an effort to attract more passengers who wanted to travel inexpensively but not in steerage, most shipping lines introduced an intermediate one-way fare in the early 1890s ranging between [pounds sterling]7 and [pounds sterling]8 ($31.50 to $36.00), which would fall during the late 1890s. To convey a sense of the relatively low cost of this intermediate fare, one might compare the cost of a second-class round trip (about $63.00) to the price of one of the most popular leisure items in the late nineteenth-century United States, the bicycle. In the second half of the 1890s, bicycles were advertised in newspapers and magazines for prices ranging from $20 (Scientific American) or $34.50 (The Youth's Companion) to as high as $85 (The New York Times) or $100 (The Delineator). (18) A round-trip ticket from America to Europe in the 1890s cost no more than a moderately priced bicycle. Certainly neither bicycles nor round-trip tickets across the ocean were cheap, but, as suggested by the huge popularity of bicycles during the 1890s, saving sufficient money for either expenditure was within the means of a large section of the population of the United States. (19) In addition to the falling costs of first class, second class, and steerage passage during the last third of the nineteenth century, traveling across the ocean became even more attractive because most shipping lines by this time could promise that their ships would cross the Atlantic safely in an average of ten days. (20)

But intellectual elites, along with many other Americans who enjoyed overseas travel, did not choose to go abroad simply because technological improvements in steamships made leaving home easy. The Civil War may have also made Americans psychologically predisposed to travel. After years of sacrifice and bloodshed, Americans were ready to shift their interests away from national concerns and indulge their curiosity in the less harrowing challenges of international travel. As Mark Twain's popular novel of 1869, The Innocents Abroad, suggests, traveling to Europe became a popular pastime among a broad range of America's middle class. "Everybody was going to Europe [in 1867]," Twain reported enthusiastically: "--I too, was going to Europe.... The steamship lines were carrying Americans out of the various ports of the country at the rate of four or five thousand a week." (21) By going to Europe and places farther afield, Americans were not necessarily escaping from the difficult realities of post-Civil War America. Many were also indulging a healthy curiosity about the outside world. For people like Henry and William James, travel provided access to networks of accomplished foreign colleagues--networks that, in many ways, anticipated the vibrant intellectual circles that would be emerging a few decades later with the institutional support of the modern American university. (22)

Although the James brothers and many of their friends and colleagues often chose travel as a means of escape from their day-to-day lives in the United States, more often than not they were motivated to travel to some destination, in hope of finding adventure and new discoveries. Some of the more literary Americans went to meet with leading writers and thinkers of their day. American visual artists, as Henry James pointed out in his biography of William Wetmore Story, were particularly attracted to the idea of learning their craft in Europe because of the dearth of art schools in the United States through most of the nineteenth century. They were also eager to learn from the example of the masters of Renaissance Italy or classical Greece, whose works were largely unavailable for close inspection in America. During their stays abroad many American visitors to Europe also traveled together in small groups to share in the joys of discovery. Augustus Saint Gaudens fondly recalled in his memoirs (dictated in 1906) a river journey through the south of France taken in 1878 that he shared with his good friend the architect Stanford White, and White's associate Charles F. McKim. In addition to the great diversity of sights he saw as "they passed under stone bridges and by towns with churches with stone spires," Saint Gaudens was impressed by the unique smells that surrounded them as they progressed towards their southern destination: "the smell of garlic ... pervaded our ship from the tip of her bow to the end of her stern. She was thoroughly impregnated, inside and outside, upside and down, and in every direction, with that perfume. We were in the land of garlic, and there was no doubt about it." (23) In this scene, Saint Gaudens's repeated reference to the smell of spices underscores the sculptor's enjoyment of the unique and uncanny atmosphere that often greets travelers during long journeys on steamships.

By 1935, writers such as Thomas Wolfe strongly suggested that the ships traveling across the Atlantic in the early twentieth century had become an important site of the imagination--a place that allowed people to think and act in ways that they might not allow themselves to do otherwise. The protagonist in Wolfe's autobiographical Of Time and the River (1935) looks upon a giant, 60,000 ton ship in the evening, waiting to take its passengers on a voyage from Cherbourg, France, to America:

  Her enormous superstructure with its magnificent frontal sweep, her
  proud breast which was so full of power and speed, her storied decks
  and promenades ... --all of this, made to move upon the stormy seas,
  leaning against eternity and the gray welter of the Atlantic at
  twenty-seven knots an hour, tenanted by the ghosts, impregnated by the
  subtle perfumes of thousands of beautiful and expensive women, alive
  with the memory of the silken undulance of their long backs ... --all
  of this, with the four great funnels that in the immense drive and
  energy of their slant were now cut sharp and dark against the evening
  sky. (24)

As Wolfe suggests, by 1935 the allure of steamships already had acquired a decades-long pedigree that had grown steadily since the second half of the nine-teenth century.

Fifty years before Of Time and the River, William Dean Howells depicted the connection between oceanic travel and the imagination in his novel, The Lady of the Aroostook (1879). In this novel, a young man and woman, Staniford and Lydia, begin a romance on board the Aroostook. Toward the end of the story the couple discusses the magical effect of being together on board ship for such a long time:

  'I wonder, [Staniford] said, 'if you have anything of my feeling,
  nowadays. It seems to me as if the world had gone on a pleasure
  excursion, without taking me along, and I was enjoying myself very
  much at home.'
    'Why yes,' she said, joyously; 'do you have that feeling, too?'
    'I wonder what it is makes us feel so,' he ventured.
    'Perhaps,' she returned, 'the long voyage?'
    'I shall hate to have the world come back, I believe,' he said,
  reverting to the original figure. 'Shall you?' (25)

The uncanny feelings inspired by ocean voyages were described in correspondence between Henry Adams and Elizabeth Cameron in 1891. Cameron, the unhappy wife of Senator James Donald Cameron from Pennsylvania, had been a good friend of Henry Adams and his wife Marian "Clover" Adams when the Adamses lived in Washington, D.C. After the sudden suicide of Clover in 1885, Henry Adams became increasingly enamored of Cameron, to whom he expressed some of his deepest feelings. Because neither Henry Adams nor Elizabeth Cameron dared to brave the scandal that would result if Cameron left her husband, the love between them, although passionate, never developed beyond intimate confidences. Over the years Adams and Cameron met frequently in Washington, Paris, and London, their frustrated desires inspiring many epistolary confessions. In a letter written in 1891, Adams describes how Cameron's departure from England to America on a steamship just hours before he sat down to write had allowed him to express his feelings to her more frankly than usual:

  I have shivered over the fire, chatting feebly [with friends] ... but
  always mentally wandering from the talk and the dim landscape to you
  and your ship.... I lie for hours wondering whether you, out on the
  dark ocean, in surroundings which are certainly less cheerful than
  mine sometimes think of me.... I would not distress you with these
  questions while you were fretted, worried and excited by your last
  days here; but now that you are tossing on the ocean, you have time to
  see the apocalyptic Never which has become yours as well as mine. I
  have dragged you face to face with it, and cannot now help your seeing
  it. (26)

Writing after seeing Elizabeth Cameron's ship fade away from the English coast, Adams lamented their inability to change the fate of their relationship. Imagining Cameron miles away, alone with her thoughts on a steamship, Adams also desperately envisioned a paradoxical connection growing between them: the bittersweet realization that their love must remain a secret.

Oceanic travel could open up imaginative possibilities far beyond the space of a ship's decks. With the improvements in the steamship making travel across the Atlantic as easy as, if not easier than, overland travel to California and other western destinations on the American continent, crowded and time-worn Europe began to emerge as a locus of the imagination that was as powerful and evocative as the untamed American West.

Certainly the two destinations offered different possibilities for travelers. William Dean Howells describes these two contrasting attractions in The Lady of Aroostook. The main character, the young Staniford, makes this comparison while explaining to his friend the reasons why he chose to travel to Italy. "I think a bit of Europe will be a very good thing for the present, or as long as I'm in this irresolute mood. If I understand it, Europe is the place for American irresolution." Europe, then, offers a place where Staniford might make up his mind about his future vocation in America. Staniford also anticipates the possibility that Europe might actually offer options for a vocation that were not as easy to pursue in America: "Well, I may form some tie in Italy. Art may fall in love with me, there. How would you like to have me settle in Florence, and set up a studio instead of a ranch,--choose between sculpture and painting, instead of cattle and sheep?" (27)

Boarding a ship to cross the Atlantic with the knowledge that the trip would be safe (if not enjoyable), and with the expectation that arriving in far-off lands might be exhilarating, travelers often entered their "world between worlds" in high spirits. It is little wonder, then, that they found themselves particularly open to contacts with people and ideas they might not encounter during their normal daily routine. William James wrote to Charles Eliot Norton from England in 1902, casually reporting that during his voyage to Europe he had met one of the most important cultural critics of the day: "Henry D[emarest] Lloyd, whose name you know as that of a state-socialist writer, sat opposite to us [during the transatlantic journey], and proved one of the most 'winning' men it was ever my fortune to know." (28) In 1892 Henry Adams met Rudyard Kipling, who was introduced to him by Henry James. In another trip in 1902, this time to Europe, Adams enjoyed being, "'coddled all the way over,' as he was pleased to tell, by his young actress friends Elsie de Wolfe and Ethel Barrymore." (29) Traveling for many days on the secure but relatively small space of an ocean-going vessel, one began to expect the unexpected. Serendipitous encounters during their travels became an essential part of voyagers' personal, professional, and intellectual development.

William Dean Howells may have in fact owed the beginning of his literary career to the steamship. His first book found a publisher thanks to a fortuitous literary acquaintance that Howells started while traveling on the Cunard steamer, Asia, from London to Boston in late July of 1865. The acquaintance was Melancthon M. Hurd of the New York and Cambridge publishing company of Hurd & Houghton. On the ship the men established a friendly relationship, playing games such as ringtoss, shuffleboard, and euchre. A few weeks later in New York, after meeting by chance on the street, Howells discussed his manuscript of Venetian Life with Hurd, who "accepted the manuscript [for publication] on the spot, without even asking to read it." (30)

Thomas Sergeant Perry, an editor for the Atlantic Monthly and a close childhood friend to William and Henry James, made a jocular allusion to the possibility of creating a spontaneous community during the transatlantic journey in a letter to William James written on October 20, 1909 from Giverny, France. Perry playfully confessed to James that his latest book, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to 'Pragmatism', seemed very congenial to him but that he didn't really understand epistemology. Besides, Perry jibed tongue in cheek, that for "my own part I have never been troubled by any uncertainty as to what is Truth. Truth is what I think. When others think otherwise, they are wrong." He later protested that James's work was so good that he was unable to stop reading it before the start of a trip back to the United States: "You have beautifully ennobled philosophy by making it seem human instead of a thing of formulas. Your comparisons and joyous chaff delight me. No wonder the bigwigs hate you. I keep opening your book, reading it with delight. I can never keep it for the ship (I am sure it will bring to shore crew and passengers all devoutly sworn to the new faith)." (31) Perry playfully imagined that his voyage back to the United States will open up an opportunity for him to become a philosophical evangelist who can use liminal space on a transatlantic steamer to transform his fellow travelers into devotees of William James. Perry's joke hinged on the fact that traveling can indeed be a transforming, and potentially sacred, experience.

While exploring the world's cultures by steamship (as well as by rail), Victorian elites became more at ease with their limitations in attempting to assimilate or understand all of this diversity. As the nineteenth century waned, they began to see American culture as being on an equal footing with the world's older cultures, all of which contained their own forms of brilliance and backwardness, their own creative possibilities and their own versions of sterile "cant." (32) The important discovery made by Henry James and many of his ilk was that they could admire other cultures without denigrating the ideas and traditions of their own. It is not entirely surprising that these artists and intellectuals would articulate a meaning of travel in terms of cultural appreciation for both old and new Western cultures. What is perhaps less expected is to find a similar response among students of a considerably younger generation affected by yet another breakthrough in transatlantic travel following World War I.

Seagoing ships became larger, safer, and more comfortable in the early twentieth century. Steel became the chief construction material in 1900, and that same year private baths became common for the cabins. Turbine engines and wireless communications were characteristic in 1910, and additional technologies made ocean travel safer and easier, including the gyroscopic stabilizer, gyroscopic compass, Frahm anti-rolling tanks, submarine signals, and the ice signaller. Sending American soldiers to Europe during World War I started a frenzy of transatlantic travel, with 250,000 Americans crossing the Atlantic each year in the late 1920s. Most of them were buyers and tourists, but a notable proportion were students, enabled by the creation of a "tourist third class" category that was relatively inexpensive, and reasonably comfortable. Fares were as low as $110 round trip. (33)

Prior to 1914 American students, mostly postgraduates or those pursuing careers in medicine or the arts, sought advanced professional training or scholarship in Europe, especially Germany, throughout the nineteenth century, and in increasing numbers at the turn of the century. (34) After World War I the numbers of Americans studying in Europe, especially France, continued to increase, aided in part by the creation of the Junior Year Abroad for undergraduates. (35) The Junior Year Abroad started in 1923 at the University of Delaware. Raymond W. Kirkbride, a professor of French and a veteran of World War I who had served in France and studied at the University of Grenoble before demobilization, started the Delaware Foreign Study Plan with the support of the President of the University of Delaware, Walter Hullihen. In trying to persuade other colleges and universities of the merits of the new program, Hullihen claimed that it would prepare students for international business and the Foreign Service, and so serve United States' international interests. "We shall always be at a disadvantage in our foreign relations of every kind ... until there is a much larger number of Americans who know the language and in some measure the customs and methods of the peoples with whom we have to deal." (36) Two years later, inspired by the Delaware example, Smith College started its own Junior Year in France program, "to solve the problem of giving the students who major in French a more thorough knowledge of the French language, literature, and culture." (37) Between 1923 and the outbreak of war in 1939, these two programs alone sent some 1200 undergraduates to France for one year of study.

The majority of juniors who studied abroad in the 1920s and 1930s came from colleges on the East Coast, notably the women's colleges, but the University of Delaware recruited actively all over the country, and students from different regions took advantage of the opportunity. Their motivations varied. Many echoed the program organizers' stated purposes of allowing students to learn French well and become French teachers, or to enhance their academic credentials in other majors, like political science or art history, and so prepare them for careers in international relations or business. Others viewed a year of study in France as an education in general culture. Aureta E. Lewis wrote in 1937 that, "Most of the Group members are college juniors and many of these are French majors. Some wish to spend a year in France in order to master the language as a preparation to returning to America to teach it." Lewis notes that other French majors planned careers in business. Another group of students majored in fields like history or political science and anticipated that a year of study in France would be valuable for their studies. Still other students wanted to study art or music in France, and "there are those who have no special plans for the future but who wish to broaden themselves by this rich cultural experience." (38)

Most students had not traveled to Europe before, and this first ocean voyage, independent of their parents, was a significant venture. Students had planned for this trip, and were selected on the basis of their grades, competency in French (though this was not a very rigorous standard), general health, and adaptability. They were enthusiastic, excited, and filled with ideas about France and the French, and a positive attitude toward travel. In a sense, they were almost obliged to enjoy their trip because in many cases they had worked hard to convince their parents that a year of study abroad was worthwhile. After the first few years, program organizers deliberately tried to book passage on French Line ships so that students would encounter things and persons French from the beginning, and students indeed noticed cultural differences during the voyage.

Students were amazed at the way food was served, and at the ready availability of alcohol on board, especially during Prohibition. For Marian Sage the food itself as well as the serving of it, was different. In a letter to her parents in 1927 she wrote: "The meals are a scream. Everything is served as a different course and they keep giving you clean plates and forks all the time.... We always have cheese with every meal. They give you a lot to eat, but you never can eat more than a third of it because the other two thirds are so very strange." (39) Most students liked the meals on board the ship--"The food is simply grand," wrote Mary Louise Cahill in 1936 from aboard the SS Champlain. (40)

However, one of the first students on the Delaware Foreign Study Plan of 1923 remembered a less elegant situation aboard the Rochambeau. T. Russell Turner explained, "We started out in steerage cabin, they called it, and we couldn't stand the food, so we paid the difference and moved upstairs." He had no complaints about traveling second class, though he recalled little in the way of entertainment on the voyage: "there were no deck games as I recall or anything like that. Of course no swimming pool on a ship that was small as it was.... It was very informal." (41) Several years later, in 1929, W. Emerson Wilson described the transatlantic crossing aboard the Caronia as "delightful," and the biggest surprise for him was being invited to have a drink by the business administrator from the University of Delaware who served as a chaperone for the group. "Well, this was prohibition at home, and Buzz Wilkinson was especially hard on any students who'd break the rule and who went to the speak-easies in Newark. And then to be invited by him to have a drink it was just, you know, a surprise." (42) Marian Sage and Marie Holslag enjoyed drinking champagne for the first time, but Mary Louise Cahill disapproved of the other group members and passengers drinking so much: "Nancy Leonard, Helen Graham, and I are the only ones having a good time, by ourselves--not drinking any cocktails!" (43)

The food, the many separate courses, and alcohol were new and strange practices that students learned aboard the ships, and that did, indeed, prepare them for France. Additionally, some learned more about French manners and customs during the voyage, and they started the process of learning the French language, though most thought they knew it quite well before the voyage. Robert H. Richards claimed that his French was very poor, even though he had studied it for six or eight years before studying abroad in 1927. He says of the transatlantic voyage: "All I can remember is some sort of a spelling bee arrangement. I don't mean in spelling, but you would line up as in a spelling bee, and if you missed a question, then you went down the ladder and had to climb your way up. I reposed quietly at the bottom of the ladder without any difficulties." (44) His future wife, Harriet Kellond, whom he met on the trip, had memories of a more successful introduction to French culture during the voyage. Mrs. Robert H. Richards remembered that the assistant director for women on the Delaware Foreign Study Plan took advantage of the voyage, especially mealtimes, to instruct women students on French manners. According to Mrs. Richards, Miss Dennis "told us exactly how we should behave, and I've never forgotten the things she told us .... how you hold your knife and fork, and how you eat your dessert with a spoon and fork." Students learned the reasons behind certain behaviors as well. For example, she reported that Miss Dennis advised them to send live flowers, not artificial ones, to their host family in the event of a death in the family, "because your association with them was something new,.... She told us things like that, you see, that Americans might not know. Words we should use and words that we shouldn't use [in French]." (45)

After a year in France Patricia Cross described the transatlantic voyage in 1937 as "a marvelous transition from the old life to the new." Well-versed in literary French before the trip, she learned from the steward how to say soap in French. "Villon, Pascal, and Flaubert had taught me much, but they failed me when I wanted to wash my hands. No soap in sight, but the steward was quick to understand my request for something 'pour laver les mains.' 'Mais oui, du savon,' [for washing the hands. But yes, soap] said he, and there was a new word never to be forgotten." (46) Sally Johnston also learned French practices and language from waiters and stewards on the ship. She claims that when she and her friends ordered a late breakfast one morning, the waiter was disappointed in their selections: he said, 'du lait froid?' (cold milk?) in a sort of a resigned tone as if all hope were abandoned. He doesn't eat a breakfast like that!" Johnston tells her family that the assistant director did, in fact, teach them useful French phrases, like, "'Enchantee de faire votre connaissance' [delighted to meet you] when meeting someone," but constant instruction came from the waiters at mealtimes. "The problem of our French is hilarious--the waiters have received instructions, I think, to talk no English to us, so we have a gay time trying to order our meals. They are really hilarious, because they correct our French so gravely and are so funny." (47) Johnston, whose father was a math teacher in Detroit, but who could not have attended Mount Holyoke College or studied abroad without the financial assistance of a benefactor, seems to have been bemused by learning French from waiters. However, her French was improving, as she wrote frequently to her parents. And Johnston, like many others, was learning about cultural difference from being aboard a French ship.

Learning French also took the form of shipboard flirtations, as J. Edward Davidson noted in 1936. Describing the great success of students' singing performance at the tourist-class gala, he continues, "Evidently this singing epidemic affected the feminine members of our party, for they developed the habit of leaning over the back rail and exchanging serenades with the French sailors. In return for 'The Music Goes Down and Around' the French would chant 'Sous les toits de Paris.'" (48)

Learning to live with and appreciate the French did not come easily to many students. A letter from Marian Sage suggests that she lumps together third-class passengers and French people in an unfavorable way, though the meaning is also ambiguous: "Gussie was right about third class .... the people are rather terrible! Of course, almost everyone except ourselves is French, and we have great struggles to make ourselves understood." (49) Some shipboard lessons became apparent only later, as Margaret Goddard noted in 1935. After she was in Paris and living with a family on the rue Guynemer, she made a belated discovery regarding an incident from the voyage. "We finally discovered tonight why the man that sat at the table with us on the boat, an ex-member of the Lafayette Escadrille, was so shocked when we were entirely ignorant about Guynemer. It seems he was one of the great heroes of France, a war ace, a tablet to him in the Pantheon and all sorts of memorials, as well as the street name. We came across all this in Baedeker this afternoon by chance. Now we feel a little more tolerant of our table mate than we did when we first heard him." (50)

The pleasures and entertainment of shipboard life kept students busy and staved off homesickness. They met other members of the group, and sometimes table assignments were deliberately changed to facilitate the process. Students organized little performances at dinner, with singing, music, and knock-knock jokes. They played shuffleboard, ping pong, deck tennis, and watched ship board "horse racing." They sat in deck chairs, read, talked, wrote letters, and danced. Many were very class conscious and commented on the social standing, or lack of it, of group members or of passengers. Staying up late or rising early to watch the ship land at Plymouth became a ritual that many students shared. Movies were in English with French subtitles, so some students practiced their reading skills by reading the translations. Although students were supposed to speak French and avoid English, and most did make some effort, the ocean voyage was more for pleasure and transition to the real work of the year. Mary Louise Cahill indicated to her parents that the director was not strict with her charges on board ship: "she says she doesn't want to spoil our boat trip--she'll have plenty of time to be strict when we get there!" (51)

Several students conveyed a sense of the importance and privilege the ocean voyage to Europe represented for them. Eleanor Daniels wrote to her parents shortly after leaving the United States in 1937: "Thank you, thank you, thank you for letting me come--it's going to be wonderful, I know." (52) Beatrice Hume Farr Davis claims later in her life that she and other students in 1931 were well aware of how fortunate they were to be traveling to Europe at a time when such trips, though increasingly accessible, were still long and costly: "We were so keen on what we were going to do, and everyone--it was as though all of us had all our pores open for new experiences to pour in. And we were sharing what we thought--and what was then--a privileged and unique experience." (53) Anticipating the ship's arrival at Le Havre and then the train ride to Paris, Sally Johnston wrote to her family: "It seems utterly incredible that it's I but it is." And assessing the voyage as it came to end, she indicated: "Well, it was swell fun and I'm sorry that it's over because I love the water, but more fun is ahead and more interesting things. France, here I come!" (54)

Representing two extremes in terms of the material conditions of the ocean voyage, two different students nonetheless were grateful for the opportunity of traveling across the Atlantic to France. Harold E. McCarthy, a student at the University of California, was one of eleven students selected from all over the United States to visit France for two weeks in 1937 at the behest of the French Embassy. The French pulled out all the stops in order to make this a pleasant and memorable trip for the American students, wining and dining them on the recently launched French Line ship, Normandie. McCarthy responded enthusiastically to these blandishments, writing of the trip, "From the beginning to the end, from the first day aboard the Normandie until the last, when the train got under way at the St. Lazare station, all has been like a dream." He was thrilled with the ship, describing the Normandie as "the essence of modern art, the last word in modern science. Our tourist class was palatial." The crossing was "magnificent," according to McCarthy: "Treated like kings, eating the most exquisite food served by capable maitres d's whose courtesy seemed typically French. We were invited to lunches and to teas, to gatherings where we met the most distinguished French persons [including the wife of President Lebrun], thus making contact with French culture even before arriving in France." (55)

Ten years later Miriam Halbert, recently graduated from Miami University in Ohio, won a scholarship to study in Paris, and sailed to France on the Marine Tiger, "a troop ship, owned by the government," and about to be converted for passenger use. She, along with almost 500 other passengers, half of them students, endured less then luxurious conditions on the former troop ship. "I don't think hell could be as hot as the first couple of days we spent aboard this craft," she wrote to her mother in 1947. Instead of cabins, passengers stayed in huge rooms lined with bunks for forty-eight people. The food was a far cry from the exquisite cuisine of the Normandie: "The only nausea I've felt has been a result of the odors [in various parts of the ship] or the food. The kids at Miami thought it remarkable that I could eat North Hall food with such relish, but that was a slice of heaven compared to the stuff they give us here. I immediately lose my appetite when I see them throw it on these aluminum trays we use for dishes." Nonetheless, Halbert thoroughly enjoyed meeting the diverse persons of many different nationalities on board, and the discomfort did not detract from her appreciation of being able to travel to France so soon after the war. "We all do our share of griping, but it isn't anything more than good healthy griping because we students fully realize how very fortunate we are to be able to make the trip." (56)

Halbert and her fellow passengers partook of the final flourish of the Atlantic ocean voyage in the years immediately following World War II. A decade later air travel had cut substantially and irrevocably into ship bookings and ship line profits. (57) But for close to a century, starting in 1865, several generations of American travelers experienced the transatlantic voyage as an initiation or transition into another world, both imaginative and physical. Their accounts challenge historiography that posits a rigid demarcation between precapitalist or preindustrial travel, and commercialized, commodified tourism. For they suggest continuity in the experience of travel over a critical period of modernization in terms of discovery, wonder, and perplexity. The ocean voyage represented a process of leaving the familiar, and anticipating a foreign land, culture, and people, or simply the pleasure of an alternative way of being. This study lends concreteness to claims by Rudy Koshar and other historians, that the meaning travelers make of their displacement can defy overarching theories and abstractions. Instead of a history of decline or missed opportunities, these travelers' accounts suggest that a "history of possibility" or "history of healthy curiosity" is also a useful frame for understanding travel, especially the ocean voyage.

Moreover, our work contributes to a recent trend toward the "internationalization" of United States history. (58) Understanding the myriad ways that Americans interacted with the world provides new insights into the construction of American literary and national identities. For many of the transatlantic travelers, physical distance from family and community was almost a prerequisite for articulating a sense of self. Simultaneously, the ocean voyages also afforded an opportunity of apprehending a larger world beyond the boundaries of the United States by offering a contrast between familiar, national values and practices, and imagined or foreign alternatives. They were often a prelude to an internationalist outlook that entailed appreciation for other cultures and a skeptical reevaluation of nationalism as an "imagined community," to use Benedict Anderson's conceptualization. (59)

Between 1865 and 1947, as the numbers of American travelers increased, the class backgrounds of those travelers became more diversified. While it is true that immediately following the Civil War the majority of tourists circulated in well-heeled circles where one might find Henry James, by 1938 Sally Johnston and thousands of college students like her had demonstrated that European journeys were not just for the rich any more. Although their backgrounds differed, erudite authors of the nineteenth century as well as college students of the twentieth shared the same thirst for discovery and adventure in Europe. Luckily for historians, both groups also left extensive written records concerning their travels. And because Johnston and many like her went into teaching languages and history in high school classrooms across America, the imaginative doors that connected the American consciousness to European culture in the nineteenth century would remain open for future generations in the twentieth. Johnston and her classmates were, in short, the intellectual progeny of people like Henry James.

Like the fictional character Isabel Archer in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady (1880-1881), they would have been surprised at the claim that her "purposes" in traveling to Europe seemed "mysterious." A student in the early twentieth century might have responded similarly to Isabel Archer when asked why she was crossing the Atlantic: "Is there anything mysterious in a purpose entertained and executed every year, in the most public manner, by fifty thousand of my fellow-countrymen--the purpose of improving one's mind by foreign travel?" (60)

ENDNOTES

Whitney Walton gratefully acknowledges the Spencer Foundation for supporting part of this research with a Small Research Grant.

1. Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2 vols. (Boston, 1903), 1: 12.

2. Letter of 31 August 1938 from Sarah Alice Johnston to her family, in Ellen J. Maycock, ed., Sally Goes to France: Letters from a Junior Year, 1938-1939, typed manuscript, 18. Many thanks to Ellen Maycock for sharing her mother's letters as she prepares them for publication.

3. Thomas Haskell, "Taking Exception to Exceptionalism," review of Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, by Daniel Rodgers, Reviews in American History 28 (2000): 152. For an excellent and brief discussion of recent historiography concerning American exceptionalism, please read Haskell's entire review, Reviews in American History 28 (2000): 151-166. For a more extended discussion, see Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York, 1996).

4. In 1926 Mumford argued that the country's intellectual high point, its "golden day," occurred between 1830 and 1860, the age of Emerson: "That world was the climax of American experience. What preceded led up to it: what followed, dwindled away from it." See Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture (New York, 1926), 91. The life of William Dean Howells (a close friend of Henry James) shows some problems in favoring the "organic intellectual" over other kinds of intellectuals. If the definition of an "organic intellectual" is, as we take it, a person who writes or theorizes about science, culture, or society during much of his or her life and who remains close and faithful to some underprivileged segment of society he or she came from, that would mean overlooking one important reason why some people try to be intellectuals: to disassociate themselves from a provincial viewpoint in order to get some critical distance on their lives and their culture. Howells, who grew up in a very modest household in various part of rural and urban Ohio, started to learn foreign languages from a very early age, and also long dreamed of moving to the nation's literary capital, Boston. Howells certainly never renounced his working-class Ohio background, but neither did he ever return to live in Ohio during his adult life. The term "organic intellectual" originated with Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. See Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, in University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization: Volume Nine--Twentieth-Century Europe, eds. John W. Boyer and Jan Goldstein (Chicago, 1987), 326-327. For a detailed and compelling discussion of the widespread mistrust of the cosmopolitan aspirations of the intellectual since the time of the Dreyfus Affair, see Ross Posnock, "How It Feels to Be a Problem: DuBois, Fanon, and the 'Impossible Life' of the Black Intellectual," Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 323-349.

5. In the still influential No Place of Grace, T. J. Jackson Lears pushes the damning argument against the Victorian elite to its furthest point: "Historians have long castigated Gilded Age culture for its failure to grapple with the realities of a raw, new industrial society; in actuality that 'failure' served an important social purpose. By denying the dilemmas posed by modernization, the official doctrines [posited by many American intellectuals] provided both a source of escape from unprecedented conflict and a means of legitimizing continued capitalist development in a liberal polity." T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York, 1981), 22. For a recent restatement of the interpretation that travel by Victorian elites was motivated by racism, see Alex Zwerdling, "Anglo-Saxon Panic: The Turn-of-the Century Response to 'Alien' Immigrants," Ideas from the National Humanities Center 1 (1993): 33-45. In an article on Henry James's good friend Henry Adams, William Stowe makes explicit the often implicit prejudices against Americans who travel abroad: "Travel has always been a seductive, and a slightly irresponsible activity. In exchange for privileged positions as onlookers, appreciators, and critics, travelers give up their connection with the life around them, becoming passive spectators who can neither claim credit nor accept responsibility for the scenes they observe." William W. Stowe, "Henry Adams, Traveler," New England Quarterly 64 (1991): 179.

6. For a particularly influential Marxist study of late nineteenth-century travel, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley, 1986). As the title implies, Schivelbusch argues that the logic of industry and of capitalism shapes the experience of travel to the point of dehumanizing railway passengers: "... the railroad, the industrial process in transportation, did become an actual industrial experience for the bourgeois, who saw and felt his own body being transformed into an object of production" (122). Schivelbusch does find that Americans seemed to be more convivial on their trains than Europeans were on trains in Europe. He cites the extraordinary lengths of the trips in America as one reason for the need for mobility on American trains as opposed to the relative immobility of European railway passengers on short trips who were stuck in "the European compartment" (107). Unfortunately, Schivelbusch ends his chapter on American railroads by implying that this American desire to move around the compartments of the train is symptomatic of some sort of nervous psychosis, thus dismissing the possibility of cultivating positive experiences during a journey.

7. Paul Fussell, "Travel, Tourism, and 'International Understanding,'" in Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays, by Paul Fussell (New York, 1988), pp. 151-176; Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (New York, 1980); James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 (Oxford, 1993); Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago, 1998).

8. For an early influential description of the negative effects of travel by people from Europe and the United States, see Louis Turner and John Ash, The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery (New York, 1975) which depicts tourists as barbaric destroyers of authentic cultures. Daniel Boorstein's The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York, 1971) also features a lament in his chapter "From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel" which contrasts the more serious and active art of traveling to the frivolous and passive practice of tourism. For some more recent work on travel and tourism that also follows the supposed slippery slope of modern tourism, see John Urry's The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London, 1990) which distinguishes between the slower and more focused activities of the British seaside resort and the "post-touristic" gaze which seeks out fast and exotic attractions, or even those known not to be authentic.

9. Akira Iriye has made some of the earliest and most eloquent arguments for looking at world events through an international or transnational framework. See Akira Iriye, "The Internationalization of History," American Historical Review 94 (1989): 1-10. Iriye's Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, 1997) makes a strong case for "cultural internationalism" as having been an important force in shaping world events. For an early argument for looking at American history in an international context, see David Thelen, "Of Audiences, Borderlands, and Comparisons: Toward the Internationalization of American History," Journal of American History 79 (1992): 432-462. A more recent example of the globalization or internationalization of United States history is Kristin Hoganson, "Cosmopolitan Domesticity: Importing the American Dream, 1865-1920," American Historical Review 107 (February 2002): 55-83. For an exploration of the effect of travel on American diplomacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Christopher Endy, "Travel and World Power: Americans in Europe, 1890-1917," Diplomatic History 22 (Fall 1998): 565-594. For a study of the effect of transatlantic travel on progressive thought in America, see Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 2000).

10. Rudy Koshar, "Seeing, Traveling, and Consuming: An Introduction," in Rudy Koshar, ed., Histories of Leisure (New York, 2002), 17. See also Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, eds., Tourism, Commercial Leisure and National Identities in 19th and 20th Century Europe and North America (Ann Arbor, 2000); Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (New York, 2000). Eric J. Leed asserts that in the modern era, travel no longer provides a distinctive identity, but "is a way of achieving and realizing a norm, a common identity we all share, the identity of the stranger." Eric J. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York, 1991), 287.

11. William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, 1994), 5.

12. For an imaginative analysis of the "baggage" of unquestioned assumptions that accompanies modern travel, see Ravina Aggarwal, "'Point of Departure': Feminist Locations and the Politics of Travel in India," Feminist Studies 26 (Fall 2000): 535-562.

13. Melvin Maddocks, The Great Liners, The Seafarer Series (Alexandria, VA, 1982), 34.

14. George Santayana, "The Philosophy of Travel," Virginia Quarterly Review 40 (1964): 1-10.

15. Francis E. Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, 1840-1973: A History of Shipping and Financial Management (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1975), 67.

16. Maddocks, The Great Liners, 59, 95, 98.

17. For fare prices, see Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, 40, 64, 88. For the rates of inflation and their effect on prices, see The Value of a Dollar, 1860-1989, ed. Scott Derks (Detroit, 1994), 2.

18. The Value of a Dollar, 48-49.

19. A recent historian of the bicycle, Pryor Dodge, writes that the number of bicycle manufacturers grew enormously "from twenty-seven bicycle makers employing 1,800 workers in 1890 to 312 manufacturers employing over 17,000 workers in 1900." Dodge argues that many Americans decided to refrain from buying popular consumer goods so they could afford a bicycle. He writes that in "the mid-1890s, bicycles were still costly, and consumers had to restrain themselves from other purchases. In 1896, The New York Journal of Commerce estimated that the craze for bicycles was resulting in an annual loss to trades of approximately $112,500,000.... A bicycle, costing about the same price as a good suit, supposedly put forty percent of the twenty thousand tailors in New York out of work." Pryor Dodge, The Bicycle (New York, 1996), 116-120.

20. Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, 74.

21. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims Progress (New York, 1980), 27.

22. According to one of William James's first and most eloquent biographers in the 1930s, Ralph Barton Perry, William James's cosmopolitanism, his "many and long visits to Europe, his command of modern languages, and his conversational powers secured him a host of friends in England, Germany, France, and Italy and paved the way for the reading of his books." Aware that many Americans during the 1930s would cast a suspicious eye at William James's cosmopolitan credentials, Perry added this apology: "[James's] cosmopolitanism was achieved without loss or even diminution of his Americanism, and his loyalty to his native tradition and creed enhanced his influence among Europeans, who saw in him a manifestation of the genius of the American people." See R[alph] B[arton] P[erry], "William James," in The Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson, 22 vols. (New York, 1943), 9: 600.

23. Augustus Saint Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, ed. Homer Saint Gaudens, 2 vols. (New York, 1913), 1: 244-246.

24. Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth (New York, 1935), 906.

25. William Dean Howells, The Lady of Aroostook (Cambridge, MA, 1879), 231.

26. Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, 5 November 1891, in Henry Adams: Selected Letters, ed. Ernest Samuels (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 267-269.

27. Howells, The Lady of the Aroostook, 64, 66.

28. William James to Charles Eliot Norton, 4 May 1902, in The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), 2: 166.

29. Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 352.

30. Kenneth Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York, 1970), 129.

31. Thomas Sergeant Perry, Selections from the Letters of Thomas Sergeant Perry, ed. Edward Arlington Robinson (New York, 1929), 50.

32. At the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Adams and the artist John La Farge traveled to Japan together for several months. La Farge's memories of this trip were recorded in a memoir published a few years later. Reflecting on how he encountered many new ideas during his travels in Japan, La Farge made it clear that he did not judge American beliefs, as a whole, to be "better" or "worse" than the beliefs of the Japanese. In dialogue with an imaginary skeptic (certainly modeled on Henry Adams) who claimed that La Farge did not need to "come this distance" to learn about the virtues of art as manifested by the Japanese, he explains the most important advantages he found in traveling abroad:

  "If there is anything good here [the skeptic wonders], it must
  resemble some of the good that we have with us [in the United
  States]."
  "But here at least I am freer, delivered from a world of canting
  phrases, of perverted thought, which I am obliged to breathe in at
  home so as to be stained by them. Whatever pedantry may be here, I
  have not had to live with it, and I bear no responsibility in its
  existence."

See John La Farge, An Artist's Letters from Japan (New York, 1970), 220.

33. Basil Woon, The Frantic Atlantic (New York, 1928), 5, 45, 63-64, 111-119, 157-159; Lorraine Coons and Alexander Verias, Tourist Third Cabin: Steamship Travel in the Interwar Years (New York, 2003) xii, xxi, ch. 2, 29.

34. Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the Transfer of Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1965); Carl Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 1770-1870 (New Haven, 1978); Thomas Neville Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth: Women's Search for Education in Medicine (Cambridge, MA, 1992); Gabriel Weisberg, Jane Becker, Catherine Fehrer, and Tamar Garb, Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Academie Julien (New York, 1999); Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA, 1998); Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings.

35. Numbers of Americans studying in France vary widely according to different sources, and because those studying at art schools, technical schools, or summer schools were not always counted along with those enrolled in universities. A conservative estimate of the number of Americans studying in France in April 1922 was between 600 and 700; the director of the American University Union in Paris counted 3,002 Americans studying in France in 1923-24; unofficial figures for 1927-28 noted 4,000 American students enrolled in French universities. W. Reginald Wheeler, Henry H. King, and Alexander B. Davidson, eds., The Foreign Student in America (New York, 1925), 23; Horatio S. Krans, "L'American University Union a Paris et son nouveau domicile," Revue internationale de l'enseignement 78 (1924): 242; John L. Gerig, "De l'utilite d'une maison francaise a l'Universite Columbia," no date, mimeographed report, Archives Nationales de France, AJ 16/6973 Instituts Francais a l'Etranger. Relations internationales de l'Universite de Paris (1843-1965). Relations avec les universites etrangeres: Etats-Unis (suite) (1895-1960).

36. Walter Hullihen, "Undergraduate Foreign Study for Credit toward the American Baccalaureate Degree," The Educational Record 5 (January 1924), 45. See also University of Delaware Archives [hereafter UD], Foreign Study Plan Records, 1922-1948.

37. Typed report dated 22 May 1929, located in folder: "Junior Year in France. 50 JYA France, in Smith College Archives [hereafter SC], Junior Year Abroad France. 1927-present. Class Box and Reid Hall 50. JYA. Box no. 1132.

38. Aureta E. Lewis, "Letters from a Junior in France, 1937-1938," printed pamphlet, UD AR 44 Folder C15, p. 2.

39. Letter of 22 August 1927 from Marian Sage Seewoster to her parents, SC, Box 2019.1

40. Letter of 27 August 1936 from Mary Louise Cahill to her family, SC, Box 2110.

41. Oral interview with Mr. T. Russell Turner, 12 July 1970 by Myron L. Lazarus, UD AR 97 Folder 1646, pp. 5-6.

42. Oral interview with W. Emerson Wilson, 9 August 1970 by Myron L. Lazarus, UD, AR 97 Folder 1646, pp. 4-5.

43. Letter of 27 August 1936 from Mary Louise Cahill to her family, SC Box 2110.

44. Oral interview with Mr. Robert H. Richards, Jr., 12 July 1970 by Myron L. Lazarus, UD, AR 97 Folder 1646, p. 5.

45. Oral interview with Mrs. Robert H. Richards, 21 July 1970 by Myron L. Lazarus, UD, AR 97 Folder 1646, p. 5.

46. Patricia Cross, "A Year in Paris," Vassar Alumnae Magazine 24 (March 1939), 4.

47. Sally Goes to France, 10, 12.

48. J. Edward Davidson, "Letters from a Junior in France 1936-1937," printed pamphlet, UD AR 44 Folder C-14, p. 2.

49. Letter of 22 August 1927 from Marian Sage Seewoster to her parents, SC Box 2019.1.

50. Diary entry/letter of 21 October 1935 by Margaret Goddard, SC Box 2106.

51. Letter of 27 August 1936 from Mary Louise Cahill to her family, SC Box 2110.

52. Letter of 21 August 1937 from Eleanor Daniels to her parents, SC Box 2116.

53. Oral interview with Mrs. Beatrice F. Davis (nee Beatrice Hume Farr), 15 July 1970 by Myron L. Lazarus, UD AR 97 Folder 1646, p. 4.

54. Sally Goes to France, 18-19.

55. "Impressions de Paris, d'un groupe d'Etudiants americains," France-Amerique 23 (May 1937), clipping in Archives Nationales de France, AJ 16/6968 Instituts francais a l'etranger. Relations internationales de l'Universite de Paris (1843-1965). File: Etats Unis Echanges universitaires 1902-1957--Echange de professeurs--visite d'etudiants.

56. Letter of 20 September 1947 from Miriam Elizabeth Halbert to her mother, typed transcript. I am grateful to Miriam Halbert Bales for giving copies of her letters to me and meeting with me to talk about her year abroad.

57. Maddocks, The Great Liners, 156-159; Coons and Varias, Tourist Third Cabin, 229-248.

58. Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order; Hoganson, "Cosmopolitan Domesticity"; "The National and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History," a special issue of The Journal of American History 86 (December 1999); Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings; Endy, "Travel and World Power."

59. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, 1991).

60. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York, 1986), 118.

By Mark Rennella

Harvard Business School

Whitney Walton

Purdue University

Leadership Initiative, Connell 204B

Boston, MA 02163

Department of History

West Lafayette, IN 47907-2087