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Philip J. Ethington, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 18507#X2013;1915, Journal of American History, Volume 89, Issue 3, December 2002, Page 1063, https://doi.org/10.2307/3092407
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Extract
This deeply researched and closely argued volume delivers far more than a history of North American urban tourism, although it does that extremely well. Skillfully deploying theories and methods of cultural geography, Catherine Cocks demonstrates in a remarkably precise fashion how the metaphoric social distances of class, race, and gender were enacted, reproduced, and transformed through reconfiguration of “spatial practices.”
Focusing on developments in Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., Cocks narrates a transition between two sets of “sociospatial ideals.” The one that reigned at 1850 was a “republican” spatial configuration, in which street life, train travel, and hostelry provided public spaces that were heterogeneous and relatively inclusive. Refined comportment, cultivated in domestic private space, was supposed to regulate the social differences encountered in public spaces. Hotels were built and managed to function as urban parlors. Early guidebooks were oriented toward potential residents, teaching the visitor the local ways. Cocks argues that there simply was no possibility of urban tourism before the 1870s because the imaginative and practical spaces had not yet opened up.
