America250: Histories, Memoirs, and Travelogues - 20th and 21st Centuries

 

  One of the most often cited defining traits of Americans is restlessness.  From nomadic Native Americans to the European colonizers and immigrants crossing oceans to start new lives to space exploration, Americans have seemed to share the desire to move, to explore, to test frontiers, and to push boundaries.  That trait has inspired many contributions to a huge literary nonfiction genre, travelogues.  It's one of my favorite genres, especially the travelogues that blend history, memoir, encounters and conversations with a wide range of Americans, and keen observations about American history, culture, and attitudes.  This is the first of a series of posts about some of the books that fit this genre.  In some, authors re-trace paths of historic explorers, while some authors set out with a particular theme or mission in mind.  Some  are histories of famous treks in American history and the explorers who did the trekking.  A few are journals and primary accounts written by the actual participants, and there are a few works of fiction as well.

    Here's a selection of books from and about the 20th and 21st centuries.  It's nowhere close to an exhaustive list, just books that I've read and encountered.

From World War I to about 1970, some six million black Americans fled the oppression and terror of the Jim Crow South and headed North and West is search of greater economic and civil opportunities offered by industrialization and urbanization, spurred by two world wars.  This was America's Great Migration, and made a huge impact on American history, politically and culturally.  Isabel Wilkerson's book is a masterpiece capturing that movement, told through the lives of several particular participants.  One outgrowth of the movement was the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of black culture and arts beginning in the 1920s.  Two of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance were Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.  They were best friends and literary collaborators who road-tripped across the south collecting folk tales and stories.  Then, their relationship soured and they had a passionate and bitter falling-out.  Zora and Langston tells their story.  Imani Perry is a native Alabaman who left the South at a young age and returned many years later and documented her return, looking at the South with fresh eyes, in her book South to America.

The Great Depression was the impetus of many journeys.  Families packed up meager belongings and crossed the country hoping to find economic security.  Adults abandoned families and took to the road, and children were given up for adoption.  The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps my favorite novel ever, is the epic story of the Joad family making such a journey from the Dust Bowl ravaged Oklahoma to California.  Photographer Walker Evans and novelist James Agee traveled to the heart of the South to document the Depression's effects on the poorest, the tenant farmers and sharecroppers, whose lives were so deprived that they barely knew that the Depression was happening.  They published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, perhaps my favorite work of nonfiction.  Cotton Tenants is a sequel, not published until years later.  And Their Children After Them continues the story even further, catching up with later generations.  

 

I just mentioned what may be my favorite fiction and nonfiction works .  Now, it's time for what may be an unpopular opinion:  I know On the Road has supposedly changed lives and is a classic, yada yada.  I hate it.  It means nothing to me.  I don't understand any part of its fame and admiration.  But that's just my opinion.  If it speaks to you, that's OK; you do you, Boo.  Route 66 is perhaps the most legendary road in America, a part of American popular culture for 100 years now.  Michael Wallis' book is the definitive book about the highway.

What could be better than combining history, travel, and food?  Two books that do that exceptionally well are The Cooking Gene  and The Potlikker Papers.  Michael W. Twitty is a favorite food historian of mine.  In his first books he tackles the African Diaspora through food, tracing southern food - soul food - back to its origins in Africa and discussing regional differences and the transformations that occurred as African, European, and American Indian foodways mingled.  John T. Edge also tackles southern food in The Potlikker Papers, but he focuses on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  The movement brought large groups of people together, and segregation meant that most dining options were not accessible to participants.  The people needed to be fed, and, throughout the South, ordinary men and women made their contribution to the movement by stepping up to feed them out of their own kitchens and in their own homes.

 

Southerners just can't help themselves; they're genetically predisposed to tell stories. so there are lots of memoirs/travelogues that do that.  These are two really good ones, especially Rick Bragg's.  Bragg is one of my favorite writers ever.  Taylor Brown is a very popular current southern novelist.  My favorite Brown novel is The River of Kings.  The River of Kings by Taylor Brown is a novel that interweaves three timelines: two brothers kayaking down Georgia's Altamaha River to scatter their father's ashes, their father's life as a shrimper and drug smuggler, and the story of a 1564 French expedition to the same river, led by artist Jacques Le Moyne (discussed in previous travelogue post, pre-1800).  Having grown up near and fished on the Altamaha, Georgia's greatest river, this book really resonated with me.

Finally, a few miscellaneous titles, coincidentally, two of which were written by Colins:  I think Colin Quinn is funny, and I enjoyed his book.  Overstated is a humorous, loving roast of all 50 U.S. states, blending cultural stereotypes, regional idiosyncrasies, and political commentary.  In American Nations,  Colin Woodard argues that the United States is not a single, monolithic culture but rather a federation of eleven distinct regional cultures. These "nations" were established by different European settler groups whose unique values, religious traditions, and political frameworks continue to shape modern politics, voting patterns, and social attitudes today. The just-published  Monster of a Land by Lauren Hough is a travelogue and social commentary that updates John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, chronicling Hough's cross-country road trip with her dog, Woody, in a refurbished van. And that brings up to the first book that I mentioned in the first travelogues post, the Classics.  I'm looking forward to reading her take.

America250: Histories, Memoirs, and Travelogues - 1800s

 

  One of the most often cited defining traits of Americans is restlessness.  From nomadic Native Americans to the European colonizers and immigrants crossing oceans to start new lives to space exploration, Americans have seemed to share the desire to move, to explore, to test frontiers, and to push boundaries.  That trait has inspired many contributions to a huge literary nonfiction genre, travelogues.  It's one of my favorite genres, especially the travelogues that blend history, memoir, encounters and conversations with a wide range of Americans, and keen observations about American history, culture, and attitudes.  This is the first of a series of posts about some of the books that fit this genre.  In some, authors re-trace paths of historic explorers, while some authors set out with a particular theme or mission in mind.  Some  are histories of famous treks in American history and the explorers who did the trekking.  A few are journals and primary accounts written by the actual participants, and there are a few works of fiction as well.

    Here's a selection of books from and about the 19th century.  It's nowhere close to an exhaustive list, just books that I've read and encountered. 

 Few books are quoted more and read less than Democracy in America, a classic 1835 and 1840 book (published in two volumes, first focusing on politics and second focusing on society and culture) by French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, following his extended visit in 1831. Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were sent by the French government to study the American prison system, but Tocqueville's observations expanded to cover all aspects of American life. He explored the successes and failures of American democracy, focusing on equality, individualism, and the role of civil society, and his observations on topics like race, the press, and the potential threats to democracy remain highly relevant today. Tocqueville sought to understand what the rise of democracy meant for the future of humanity, as he saw America as a model for the world. The book is famous for its uncanny predictions and insights into American identity,  

In Discovery of America, Leo Damrosch retraces Tocqueville's nine month visit and provides vivid context.

                                

One of the most celebrated treks in American history was that undertaken by the Corps of Discovery from 1804 to 1806.  Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were commissioned by President Jefferson to make a detailed exploration of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory.  On May 15, 1804, 45 men set out on three boats, completing their trip in 2 years and 4 months, mapping the territory, making contact with distant tribes, and collecting hundreds of specimens and natural observations of flora, fauna, and landforms previously undreamed of in the East.  Their extensive journals were published, and there have been many, many books about the journey.  One of the best is Undaunted Courage  by Stephen Ambrose.  This Vast Enterprise is a brand new (published April, 2026) "revisionist" history of the expedition, and it's on my list to read.  

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Daniel Boone was one of the first American real-life folk heroes, a pioneer, explorer, and trailblazer whose true life is still overshadowed by myths today. Essentially, he was a man who just wanted to distance himself from other people and to live independently, but he ended up contributing to the American habit of expanding the frontier.  Blood and Treasure is a great biography.  A little later and farther west, other men became legendary pathfinders, including John Fremont who was nicknamed "The Pathfinder."  Blood and Thunder and Imperfect Union are excellent biographies of Kit Carson and Fremont respectively, and you can't go wrong with any book by historian H.W. Brands.  Dreams of El Dorado is an excellent history of westward exploration from fur trappers in Oregon territory through the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush.  

                                 

                          

Throughout the 19th century, migrants drawn westward along the wagon trails often relied on manuals and memoirs written by pioneering migrants and other experts.  Some were a bit romanticized and may have misled travelers into making a journey for which they were not suited, and some were written or sponsored by railroad companies or other developers who published them for the express purpose of luring settlers.  Some of these books were very specific, offering essential survival information.  Many of these books have been reprinted over the years.

   

 Of course, white settlers who moved west didn't travel in a vacuum.  Their treks west either precipitated or resulted from the forced  expulsion of Native Americans from their traditional homes to new restrictive, foreign, and often barren lands.  Because of warfare, forced treaties, and the Indian Removal Act, thousands of Indians of Indians were forced to move, causing thousands of deaths and economic and social transformations with huge impacts still felt today. 

There are a number of memoirs and histories of slavery , but three books came to mind that fit into the category of historical journeys.  In 1853, Solomon Northup published a memoir detailing  his tragic personal odyssey.  Northup, a black musician born free and living in New York, was lured to Washington DC, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, eventually ending up on a plantation in Louisiana.  12 Years a Slave became a major success and an important part of abolitionist literature.  One of the most interesting escapes from slavery was masterminded and executed by Ellen and William Craft who disguised themselves as a young sickly white slaveowner and "his" enslaved caretaker and took trains and boats from Macon, Georgia to freedom.  Ilyon Woo details their escape in Master Slave Husband Wife.  In 2010, Joseph McGill Jr founded the Slave Dwelling Project to illuminate the lives of enslaved people across the country and gave himself the mission  of touring the country and spending the night in former slave living quarters.  Sleeping with the Ancestors is the account of his effort.

Following the Civil War, many formerly enslaved black Americans took to the road.  Some sought to escape oppression, some sought opportunity -whether economic or just the opportunity to be free and independent, and some sought family members who had been taken from them during slavery.  Many of these people moved to wide open spaces of the West, establishing homesteads and even all black towns; these people were called Exodusters.  Nell Irvin Painter's book is considered the classic standard history of the Exodusters, particularly those who settled in Kansas.  William Loren Katz also published several books about black pioneers and homesteaders.  A more recent book, Last Seen, documents the efforts made by people to reunite with relatives and friends throughout Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.

  

Other foreign visitors to the United States published books about their travels and observations during the 1800s.  In 1842, British novelist Charles Dickens traveled extensively in the US, often performing readings along the way.  Like de Tocqueville, Dickens found a lot to admire in the young republic, but he also made humorous, critical, and insightful comments.  Fanny Kemble was an English actress who met and married a rich and powerful South Carolina planter named Pierce Butler in 1834.  Butler owned large rice and cotton plantations in southeast Georgia and enslaved hundreds of people, but he was largely an absentee owner, spending most of the year in Philadelphia, where they married and lived until 1838.  In Philadelphia, Kemble was exposed to Quaker abolitionism and began to question her husband's lifestyle,  In 1838, he took her to Georgia, and she saw and experienced slavery firsthand.  She became even more of an abolitionist and journaled extensively about what she saw and lived.  Tensions grew between her and Butler, who used their children as leverage to keep her in check, threatening to take their children if she ever published her journal or caused trouble for him.  They finally divorced in 1849, and he retained custody, pretty customary at the time, and she withheld publication until 1863.  When published, her journal became an important element in swaying British public opinion against the Confederacy.  

Before his classic American novels, Mark Twain wrote classic travelogues that are still widely read today.  His dispatches and stories were widely published in newspapers across the country and abroad.  

Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain of his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War published in 1883. It is also a travel book, recounting his trips on the Mississippi River, from St. Louis to New Orleans and then from New Orleans to Saint Paul, many years after the war.  Roughing It follows the travels of young Mark Twain through the American West during the years 1861–1867. He joined his brother Orion Clemens, who had been appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, on a stagecoach journey west. Twain consulted his brother's diary to refresh his memory and borrowed heavily from his imagination for many stories in the book. 

Inspired by Mark Twain, Rinker Buck built a wooden flatboat in the early 1800s style and sailed it down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, chronicling his journey.  Honestly, I thought the book was marred because Buck got extremely, and unnecessarily, political.  I much preferred his 2015 book for which he traveled 2,000 miles following the Oregon Trail in a covered mule-drawn wagon.  The just-published American Rambler was an enjoyable read ostensibly about the life, travels, and legends of Johnny Appleseed.  However, it's a little too light on the actual history and travelogue and too much of the author's personal memoir.  

America250: Histories, Memoirs, and Travelogues - Pre 1800

 

    One of the most often cited defining traits of Americans is restlessness.  From nomadic Native Americans to the European colonizers and immigrants crossing oceans to start new lives to space exploration, Americans have seemed to share the desire to move, to explore, to test frontiers, and to push boundaries.  That trait has inspired many contributions to a huge literary nonfiction genre, travelogues.  It's one of my favorite genres, especially the travelogues that blend history, memoir, encounters and conversations with a wide range of Americans, and keen observations about American history, culture, and attitudes.  This is the first of a series of posts about some of the books that fit this genre.  In some, authors re-trace paths of historic explorers, while some authors set out with a particular theme or mission in mind.  Some  are histories of famous treks in American history and the explorers who did the trekking.  A few are journals and primary accounts written by the actual participants, and there are a few works of fiction as well.

    Here's a selection of books from the start of European colonization to about 1800.  It's nowhere close to an exhaustive list, just books that I've read and encountered. 

One of the first recorded American treks made by Europeans was the odyssey of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions, including the first documented African explorer of America, Esteban.  They were the sole survivors of the 1527 Narvaez expedition that originally landed in the Tampa Bay area of west Florida.  As the result of tragedy after tragedy and conflict after conflict, the expedition traveled around the Gulf, losing members along the way.  Finally, by the time they reached the area of Galveston Texas, only four men remained alive, and they were captured and traded among various Indian tribes.  For the next eight years, they walked throughout Texas and Mexico before reuniting with Spanish forces in northwestern Mexico.

Hernando de Soto was another early Spanish conquistador who landed in Florida and marched north.  He and his expedition were the first Europeans to explore deeply in the American southeast, credited with being the first Europeans to cross the Mississippi River, raping, pillaging, and murdering along the way.  This book provides an overview of de Soto's expedition, but its main focus is on the rather recent (and ongoing) archaeological discovery of a Spanish mission established in the wake of de Soto's journey deep in central Georgia.

Much less well known than de Soto, or even de Vaca, is the story of Jacques Le Moyne.  Le Moyne was a French artist who was part of a Huguenot (French Protestant) expedition of 300 members to the New World that fled the religious violence in France to found a settlement in the New World in 1564.  The exact whereabouts of Fort Caroline is not known.  The orthodox view that it was on the St. John's River near Jacksonville Florida, but there is a theory that it was in South Georgia on the Altamaha River.  In any event, the Spanish attacked the fort and slaughtered almost all of the inhabitants.  A few individuals, including Le Moyne, escaped and returned to France.  Le Moyne's significance is that he was the first European artist to travel to North America with the express purpose of documenting its flora and fauna, and he also documented the culture of the local Indians, the Timucua, a large group who dominated southern Georgia and northern Florida.  These illustrations were widely published and copied throughout Europe, providing invaluable documentation and history.  This book is a fascinating account of his life and work and the French-Spanish conflict.

Peter Stark just published this book in April, and it's definitely on my list of books to read.  It tells the story of Coronado's explorations of the American southwest in the 1540s, launched in search of the fabled cities of gold. 

William Bartram, who lived from 1739 to 1823, is widely regarded as the first great American naturalist.  He is credited with identifying, collecting specimens, and classifying numerous plant and animal species and documenting his travels, particularly through the southernmost colonies of South Carolina and Georgia and the territory of Florida, then under Spanish control.  Beyond his observations of plants and animals, he also wrote about his encounters with enslaved people and Indians as well as the white colonists.  Travels is indisputably a classic of the historical travelogue genre.  

Less well known than William Bartram was Mark Catesby, a naturalist and artist who explored the Caribbean and the Carolinas in the 1720s and 1730s.  Between 1729 and 1747, he published the first account of North American flora and fauna, including 220 color plates of his illustrations.  It was hugely popular, and Catesby became a major influence on later naturalists including Bartram, with whom Catesby corresponded in his later years.  

Few travelogues in history have had as great an impact on history as has Equiano's Travels, also known as The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Elaudah Equiano, an autobiography published in 1789.  The book details Equiano's kidnapping in Africa at age 11, the horrors of the Middle Passage, his extensive travels across continents, and his eventual purchase of his own freedom, serving as a powerful anti-slavery text that influenced the British abolitionist movement. 

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West is a 2019 book by David McCullough that  chronicles the settlement of the Northwest Territory (modern-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) by New Englanders in the late 18th century, focusing on the first settlement in Marietta, Ohio. The book tells the story through the experiences of key figures like Manasseh Cutler and Rufus Putnam, detailing their struggles against the wilderness and their efforts to establish a society based on ideals of religious freedom, free universal education, and the prohibition of slavery, as outlined in the Northwest Ordinance.  

During his presidency, George Washington made the effort to visit each of the thirteen states, both to educate himself about his country and also to reinforce the young country's unity.  The new country was still somewhat of a loose collection of often quarrelsome states.  There was absolutely no certainty that this wild, new, and unprecedented experiment was going to work.  Washington wanted to talk to ordinary citizens, thank them for their support, and to imbue them with the idea of being American first, rather than a New Yorker or Virginian or Georgian.  It was a major success, a great example of Washington's innate political genius.  He was an expert at imagery and setting the stage, and he used various techniques throughout his journeys to reinforce his message.  Nathaniel Philbrick, one of my favorite narrative nonfiction writers, decided to pack up his wife and dog (a la John Steinbeck in Travels With Charley) and follow Washington's routes.  This was a great read, and I highly recommend it.