Daniel Kilbride. Being American in Europe, 1750–1860

In Being American in Europe, 1750–1860, Daniel Kilbride illuminates the complex relationship between America and Europe by examining the experiences of American travelers to Great Britain and the Continent between 1750 and 1860. Throughout his analysis, he demonstrates how American travelers for the most part used these experiences not simply to confirm their preconceptions about the relationship between Europe and their own society, but also to reflect critically on those preconceptions. Thus their travels played an important role in shaping their understanding of American identity. That understanding was very much a cosmopolitan one for Kilbride. While American travelers expressed an increasingly confident sense of national identity by the 1850s, this did not mean that they repudiated their connection to Europe. On the contrary, according to Kilbride, their understanding of American nationalism was informed by an appreciation for how much the United States was a part of a larger European civilization, demonstrating that a belief in American exceptionalism and a cosmopolitan perspective were not mutually exclusive. Kilbride examines many different aspects of the travel experience, ranging from material conditions and social life to cultural perception. While the cost of travel in this period meant that American travelers came largely from an elite and wealthy background, Kilbride goes beyond the well-studied travel writings of famous figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe to examine the private writings and published works of less familiar individuals like Peter Manigault and William Preston.

Aesthetics · American exceptionalism · American studies · Archaeology · Art · Civilization · Culture of the United States · Elite · Exceptionalism · Humanities · Identity (music) · National identity · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American History and Culture · Canadian Identity and History · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law