Synopsis
Tourism emerged as an important cultural activity in the United States in the 1820s as steamboats and canals allowed for greater mobility and the nation's writers and artists focused their attention on American scenery. From the 1820s until well after the Civil War, American artists, like Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, depicted American tourist attractions in their work, and often made their reputations on those paintings. Writers like Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, and James described their visits to the same attractions or incorporated them into their fiction. The work of these artists and writers conferred value on the scenes represented and helped shape the vision of the tourists who visited them. This interest in scenery permeated the work of both serious and popular writers and artists, and they produced thousands of images and descriptions of America's tourist attractions for the numerous guidebooks, magazines, and other publications devoted to travel in the United States during the period.
