Tourists started visiting the American West in sizable numbers after the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads were completed in 1869. Contemporary travel brochures and guidebooks of the 1870s sold tourists on the spectacular scenery of the West, and depicted its cities as extensions of the natural landscape—as well as places where efficient business operations and architectural grandeur prevailed—all now easily accessible thanks to the relative comfort of transcontinental rail travel. Yet as people flocked to western cities, it was the everyday life that captured their interest—the new technologies, incessant clatter, and all the upheaval of modern metropolises. In Manifest Destinations, J. Philip Gruen examines the ways in which tourists experienced Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco between 1869 and 1893, a period of rapid urbanization and accelerated modernity. Gruen pays particular attention to the contrast between the way these cities were promoted and the way visitors actually experienced them. Guidebooks made Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco seem like picturesque environments sprinkled with civilized buildings and refined people. But Gruen’s research in diaries, letters, and traveler narratives shows that tourists were interested—as tourists usually are—in the unexpected encounters that characterize city life. Visitors relished the cities’ unfamiliar storefronts and advertising, public transit systems, ethnic diversity, and multiple dwellings in all their urban messiness. They thrust themselves into the noise, danger, and cacophony. Western cities did not always live up to the marketing strategies of guidebooks, but the western cities’ fast pace and many novelties held extraordinary appeal to visitors from the East Coast and abroad. In recounting lively anecdotes, and by focusing on tourist perceptions of everyday life in western cities, Gruen shows how these cities developed the economy of tourism to eventually encompass both the urban and the natural West.

Focuses on the 19th-century transformation in San Francisco--from Gold Rush to earthquake--to show how the city's diverse residents created a modern American city through everyday "cultural frontiers," such as restaurants, hotels, and annual fairs and expositions, among others.

In the decades following World War II, municipal leaders and ordinary citizens embraced San Francisco’s identity as the “Gateway to the Pacific,” using it to reimagine and rebuild the city. The city became a cosmopolitan center on account of its newfound celebration of its Japanese and other Asian American residents, its economy linked with Asia, and its favorable location for transpacific partnerships. The most conspicuous testament to San Francisco’s postwar transpacific connections is the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in the city’s redeveloped Japanese-American enclave. Focusing on the development of the Center, Meredith Oda shows how this multilayered story was embedded within a larger story of the changing institutions and ideas that were shaping the city. During these formative decades, Oda argues, San Francisco’s relations with and ideas about Japan were being forged within the intimate, local sites of civic and community life. This shift took many forms, including changes in city leadership, new municipal institutions, and especially transformations in the built environment. Newly friendly relations between Japan and the United States also meant that Japanese Americans found fresh, if highly constrained, job and community prospects just as the city’s African Americans struggled against rising barriers. San Francisco’s story is an inherently local one, but it also a broader story of a city collectively, if not cooperatively, reimagining its place in a global economy.

Founded during the Gold Rush years, the Chinese community of San Francisco became the largest and most vibrant Chinatown in America. This is a detailed social and cultural history of the Chinese in San Francisco.

From the Grand Tour to today's packages holidays, the last two centuries have witnessed an exponential growth in travel and tourism and, as the twenty-first century unfolds, people of every class and from every country will be wandering to every part of the planet. Meanwhile tourist destinations throughout the world find themselves in ever more fierce competition - those places marginalized in today's global industrial and information economy perceiving tourism as perhaps the only means of surviving. But mass tourism has raised the local and international passions as people decry the irreversible destruction of traditional places and historic sites. Against these trends and at a time when standardized products and services are marketed worldwide, there is an increasing demand for built environments that promise unique cultural experiences. This has led many nations and groups to engage in the parallel processes of facilitating the consumption of tradition and of manufacturing tradition. The contributors to this volume - drawn from a wide range of disciplines - address these themes within the following sections: Traditions and Tourism: Rethinking the "Other"; Imaging and Manufacturing Heritage; Manufacturing and Consuming: Global and Local. Their studies, dealing with very different times, environments and geographic locales, will shed new light on how tourist 'gaze' transforms the reality of built spaces into cultural imagery.