The means and meanings of travel in the United States changed drastically between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the eve of the Civil War. Historians have labeled this massive ...transformation the “transportation revolution,” a construct that illuminates its economic causes and effects but which reveals little about the changing experience of travel in this period. This article suggests that it is informative to focus instead on the commodification of travel that took place during the transportation revolution. Travel went from being a good produced by the travelers themselves to one produced by entrepreneurs, offered for sale in a travel marketplace, and consumed by passengers. The commodification of travel happened gradually, partially, and unevenly throughout the nineteenth century and across the geographical space of the expanding nation, and individuals’ access to commodified travel varied significantly with their race, class, and gender, as well as with the varying goals of their travel. Nevertheless, it represented a fundamental conceptual shift in the way travelers thought about travel, and made it a potential source of pleasure and recreation for a broad swath of the traveling public. This change was both celebrated and mourned by those who experienced it. This article analyzes three examples that explore the uneven and contested process of commodification that travel underwent in the first half of the nineteenth century and the new meanings that travelers assigned to their journeys in the process.
Great Expectations (1860–61) offers a lesson in what it meant to live through the nineteenth century's global revolution in transportation. The narrating protagonist Pip, looking back from 1860, ...structures his story partly around his recognition that he was born into an increasingly connected global network. From a first-person perspective, unknown activity at a distance—such as that of the convict Magwitch in Australia—turns out to be synchronically consequential. Rather than discovering, however, the fragmentation of an unknowable world, the narrator learns from the collocation and interchangeability of the transport system's passengers. These help to contribute to the development of Pip's limited third-person view of himself, from which the narrator relays his story as a networked subject.
In this city-by-city retracing of Hayes's visit, from Ashland to Astoria, author Kristine Deacon examines the symbolic power and prestige of the presidency, which Hayes used as a tool for restoring ...national harmony to a country still shattered after the end of the Civil War. Deacon describes Hayes's redirection of the federal government's Indian policy, examines the metamorphosis of presidential travel, and details how Hayes, who was accompanied by Commander of the Army General William T. Sherman, used the trip as a basis for reorganizing the U.S. Army and for advocating for greater federal involvement in stabilizing the Columbia River bar.
Critics have long readJane Eyreas an exemplary account of liberal individualism and self-expression. This essay instead argues that the novel, written in the 1840s and depicting the 1820s, employs ...the stagecoach as a Tory emblem of a Britain unified through the preservation of regional customs, against an increasingly dominant railway network. Radical though Jane Eyre's claims to speak and feel may be from the perspective of liberal narratives of progressive individualism, they are best understood in this Tory context of anti-metropolitan regionalism and preservationism. Jane's self-assertions are momentary staging posts in a journey that preserves customary regional community. The stagecoach knits the smallest, most remote places and persons into the nation while preserving their distinct identities. It is a resistant Tory mode of inscribing an alternative modernity in the era of progress.
The economic and institutional analysis of capitalism can be illustrated through John Ford's Westerns. This article focuses on six classics by Ford that show the move toward modern order, the ...creation of a new society, and the rule of law. Economic features are pervading, from property rights and contracts to markets, money, and trade. Ford has been depicted as a radical critic of capitalism, but his views prove to be more subtle, and they present the ingredients of capitalism in a prepolitical world, a world with private settlers aiming to build new communities in a hostile environment, frequently with no political institutions apart from the Army and where civil society-or pre-civil society-dominated.
