-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Dawn P. Spring, Richard K. Popp. The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 877–878, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.877
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
The Holiday Makers makes a noteworthy contribution to the growing body of literature that demonstrates the top-down construction of American culture by advertisers, corporations, the federal government, and market researchers. Richard K. Popp explores the “cultural phenomenon” of the American holiday, the packaging of mass tourism, the political and social implications of leisure travel, and the rise and fall of the American paid vacation. In the post–World War II era, the tourism industry sought to create an impulse to travel among Americans and generate their share of the postwar prosperity. Tapping into the American imagination by packaging the travel experience around “narratives of American national identity,” they attempted to instill in Americans a desire to see the nation and the world (p. 3).
Popp relies on the travel magazine Holiday from the Curtis Publishing Company, publisher of The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal, as a lens through which to view the travel industry. Holiday debuted in 1946 and served as a major mediator between the travel industry and the public. The magazine helped the industry create a “popular geography” for American tourism by presenting the public with “narratives, themes, and images of place and mobility” and developing a “tourist pedagogy” that taught people how to think about “place, leisure, and identity” (p. 7). The American tourism industry tapped into the narrative of an America transformed from a land of the Protestant work ethic to a land of fun and leisure. In this nation, the American “wanderlust” that once brought colonists to new lands and fueled the conquest of the frontier propelled Americans to vacation, and American technological innovations conquered “space and time” (p. 4).
