A Historical View of Americans Abroad

Abstract

Americans have traveled abroad in increasing numbers ever since the formation of the Republic. Their num bers at first were very limited and largely confined to the well- to-do. Newly developed means of transportation, from the trans-Atlantic steamship to the modern jet airplane, have com bined with increasing prosperity and enhanced leisure to swell the annual visitation of the Old World by Americans from a few thousands in the early nineteenth century to more than a million in the 1960's. The expansion in this tourist travel has been particularly notable in the postwar years, and there has also been a tremendous increase in the number of Ameri cans living at least temporarily abroad—American military forces and their dependents, government officials, teachers, and students. Ever since its beginnings, business, education, travel for its own sake, and vacations have been the principal motives for the European journeying. "Americans have a special call to travel," a contributor to the North American Review wrote in 1856. "It is the peculiar privilege of their birth in the New World, that the Old World is left them to visit." This is still true today and would appear largely to account for the flood of tourists annually crossing the Atlantic. For a seg ment of society now including all salaried workers and even numbers of skilled wage earners, as well as businessmen, the professional classes, and others among the well-to-do, travel abroad has become a part of the American way of life.