Travel Writing, Spectacle and World History

CONTENT 

Travel Writing, Spectacle and World History (TWSWH) is a digitized, full-color collection of correspondence, diaries, journals, manuscripts, photographs, postcards, and ephemera created by 19th- and 20th-century American women, along with contextualizing essays by noted historians and collection curators. These original materials come from the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, and they cover 1818 to 1976. Subjects addressed include American frontier life, the Boxer War in China, cultural events and customs, daily life, education, empires, finishing schools, emigration, holidays, leisure experiences, missionary work, sighting, tourism, and World Wars I and II.

The main screen opens with a revolving slide show of images within the collection, topped by a simple Search Box and tool bar with links to an Introduction, Documents, Maps, Further Resources, and Help. There are also links to Popular Searches and Advanced Search (which lets you search by Keywords, Traveller, Title, or Summary and allows for Word Stemming, Proximity, and Limiting by date). At screen bottom are rotating thumbnail illustrations highlighting other features of the system, such as Interactive Case Studies and Finding Aids.

USABILITY 

As with other AM products, this file invites both leisurely exploration and in-depth searching. I started out by reading the Introduction, which had a link to the intriguing essay "A Ford, a Tent, a Camp Stove, and the World Is Ours for the Taking: Women's Travel Writing from the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, 1819-1970s" by Marilyn Dunn and Ellen Shea, colleagues at the Schlesinger. That essay included a note about "Young Rowena Morse," who "set out from Ithaca, NY, after graduating from Cornell. In a tour of Europe with her father, she decided to stay on to study at the Sorbonne during 1922 and 1923."

While preparing for a degree in physics, Morse writes frequent letters home sharing her impressions of French customs, culture, and language. Her topics include dealing with her concierge, her wardrobe, dances, and other social engagements, as well as simply getting to know Paris and Chamonix. And from there you link into Rowena's letters to her parents, the text of which was "lovingly transcribed" by her daughter in 1991, and which we can now read very much as though we had an archival, acid-free box full of the letters right in front of us.

It is incredibly easy to page through the correspondence, not missing a thing with easy navigation, along with the ability to search within a document at any time. That foray took longer than expected because there were so many interesting links to pursue.

Next I clicked the Document link, and that took me into an alphabetical list of the documents in the collection, from Mary Adams Abbott's travel journals and correspondence to Evelyn Wendt's "Call of the Wilderness," the typed retrospective account of her 1947 trip to Alaska. Each entry contains the name of the traveler, the Title of the material, the Reference to the original, the date of the material, and the Regions mentioned.

The entries can be sorted and resorted immediately according to each of these reference points, so it's easy to find, for example, all the materials addressing Africa or East Asia. In addition, to the left of each item in the list is a box you can check to Export the citation directly into EndNote or RefWorks. Very nice.

A click on Maps took me to a screen with two methods of entry: one to Explore the major destinations of the travelers and the other to Follow and learn more about their travel routes via in-depth case studies of six selected travelers. The Further Resources link takes you to a Slideshow Gallery, Essays and Finding Aids, a Chronology of the World from 1770 to 1976, and Editor's Choice.

It seemed anticlimactic to search the file at this point, but I did some searches to see what I'd find. My simple search for "boxer rebellion" found "Typescript Transcriptions of Correspondence from China, April-December, 1921" by Julia Coolidge Deane, Mary Adams Abbott's Travel Journal 1, the Ida Pruitt Finding Aid, and Patricia Lorcin's essay "Travel Writing as a Source for Teaching World History." I explored the Advanced Search screen and found detailed explanations of various searches (phrase searching, etc.) at screen right. Good help and good placement.

One glitch only came up in the system, but it was perplexing. At various, unpredictable, times I would lose the Popular Searches and Advanced Search links from the main screen. There was just a shadow where they had been. I tried reloading the file, and sometimes they appeared, and sometimes they didn't. Hmmmm.

BOTTOM LINE 

The content is certainly a ten. The remarkably accessible and agile design gets a ten, too. For overall value to historians, TWSWH earns a resounding ten. Essential for academic libraries supporting strong gender studies and history programs, and for large public libraries with extensive history collections.

This database is an excellent resource for scholars and students of world history, tourism and travel history, and ethnic and cultural studies. Moreover, it would be a useful source for interdisciplinary studies and women's studies. Drawing on materials from the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the database comprises mainly travel accounts, diaries, and letters of women travelers from the 1830s to 1970s. Types of materials include correspondence, photographs, letters, diaries, postcards, guidebooks, and drawings. The database explores a wide variety of topics, including family life, culture and customs, race, politics, religion, exploration, art, and architecture. The interface is very user-friendly and easily navigable. Users are provided with an Introduction that explains the nature and scope of the collection, Documents, Maps, contextual essays, a chronology, and more. Those browsing the collection via the Documents tab will ind all the travelers' names in alphabetical order along with their writings. The details on archival references, dates, and regions traveled all are helpful in the selection of materials. Interactive maps give users an opportunity to explore major travel routes and destinations. Both simple and advanced search options are provided for ease of use. Users may search for documents via keywords, a title, a summary, or a traveler's name. They may also export documents to RefWorks or EndNote. The Popular Searches feature permits a look at various travelers' names, regions, countries, places, and topics. For teaching or presentation purposes, users can easily create slide shows using the database's visual materials. Help is available, and a Web 2.0 toolbar facilitates sharing of information via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Delicious, and other avenues. The wealth of primary source material--both documents and visual sources--should make this a fascinating resource for undergraduate classroom use.

Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers.

Reprinted with permission from CHOICE, copyright by the American Library Association.