For the purposes of this project, we consider American any person who was either born or settled in the officially claimed territory of the United States, which was expanding constantly then. We are aware that most travelers in the nineteenth century were men of European descent belonging to the middle or upper classes. In order to create a more accurate picture of American society at the time, we are making an effort to include travelogues written by African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, women, and working-class people. The reality of nineteenth-century travel and publishing, however, created several barriers for such groups to engage with foreign societies and produce their travel narratives. This very fact informs our analysis of who was engaging with foreign societies and what they were seeing and saying about them.

Since the Revolution, Americans were eager to insert themselves in the long tradition of travel and exploration that had–since the fifteenth century–increased the powers of many European nations. Traveling abroad provided Americans the opportunity to encounter, compete, and compare themselves with European expansionists. While motives for traveling varied from person to person, we often find Americans seizing the opportunity to establish commercial or political networks, learn from observation, and promote their own interests, values, and institutions. To be sure, many travelers went abroad in search of adventure or leisure. Many were imbued with romantic ideals, engaging in quests to find “deeper truths” or even themselves. Still, most of them carried the interests of their national society upfront and took on a sense of civilizing mission. A partial list of common nineteenth-century travelers includes activists, diplomats, investors, journalists, missionaries, mountaineers, novelists, painters, and scientists.

Americans observed foreign societies through the lenses of their own culture and way of life. Protestant Christianity, Black slavery and its brutal legacies, westward expansion and Native American oppression, bourgeois domesticity, agrarian ideals, patriarchal aspirations, mass immigration, and capitalist development, among many other things, informed the ways they interpreted foreign cultures. Their bias, however, varied according to race, class, gender, origin, level of education, religion, and all sorts of social and personal determinants. Often, American travelers thought of their society as the norm of civilization and negatively compared foreign societies to the United States. Yet at times they were open to new experiences and ended up questioning their own assumptions.

Often the American experience abroad only confirmed Americans’ cultural biases. Everything that diverged from American models seemed strange, backward, or even barbaric to nineteenth-century travelers. Therefore, travel ended up reassuring Americans that their society was on the right track. The exoticization of foreign societies often informed how Anglo-Americans thought about and dealt with minority groups in this country such as African Americans, Native Americans, and newly-arrived immigrants. Despite a general resistance to change, on many occasions Americans established cultural connections with foreigners and changed the way they understood themselves. The global presence and power of British imperial agents, for example, led many White Americans to see themselves as part of an expansionist Anglo-Saxon civilization. Although they did not have as many opportunities to travel abroad, some African Americans were able to interact with people of color in foreign countries. Through these experiences they fashioned some of the ideals that would eventually inspire the Pan-Africanist movement. Some female travelers took the opportunity to observe gender dynamics abroad and reflect on the condition of women in the United States. Ultimately, these transformative encounters with the foreigner made American society more cosmopolitan.

American encounters with foreigners could be violent. Sailors who held fast to white supremacist and patriotic ideals, for example, got involved in brawls at port cities and made many foreigners wary of this rising maritime power. Other American travelers, such as Protestant missionaries, claimed to have peaceful objectives. Nonetheless their goal was to convert foreigners and Americanize their way of life, which amounted to a form of cultural violence. These groups, however, only found partial success abroad. Foreigners resisted (or simply ignored) American impositions, and other powers–especially the British–were more capable of having their way. Moreover, some travelers were not interested in engaging with–much less changing–foreigners: they were tourists seeking only leisure or passive observers of the landscape. Yet their very presence and the inevitable demand for services (such as travel guides) certainly had an impact on those foreigners who got in touch with them. As time went by, Americans took advantage of connections with European empires and local elites to trade, invest, and establish their own enterprises or institutions abroad.