A Double Mountain Books' classic reissue, this is a story-book travelogue covering the big ranches of West and South Texas. Williams made many informal excursions to study their history, founders and owners, picking up facts, folklore and range gossip along the way. He documents the fifteen largest ranches in Texas and the ways they adapted to changing conditions in the ranching industry. Photographs and maps illustrate the text. Though it never received wide circulation following its publication in 1954, ""The Big Ranch Country"" has been recognized as a standard work by ranch historians. J.W. Williams wrote often in books and newspapers about West Texas, and his work is still cited by authors and scholars. 'The greatest merits of ""The Big Ranch Country"" are its personal, almost conversational style, and the very fact that it is dated. [M]odern-day realities do not impose themselves on this nostalgic work' - Ty Cashion. 'A valuable addition to the collector of Texana and to the mid-century reader who might have wondered just where the large range properties are and how they got that way' - William M. Pearce, ""Southwestern Historical Quarterly"", April 1956.

This unusual study combines two books in one: the 1794 autobiographical travel narrative of an Indian, Dean Mahomet, recalling his years as camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East India Company's army (1769 to 1784); and Michael H. Fisher's portrayal of Mahomet's sojourn as an insider/outsider in India, Ireland, and England. Emigrating to Britain and living there for over half a century, Mahomet started what was probably the first Indian restaurant in England and then enjoyed a distinguished career as a practitioner of 'oriental medicine, i.e., therapeutic massage and herbal steam bath, in London and the seaside resort of Brighton. This is a fascinating account of life in late eighteenth-century India - the first book written in English by an Indian - framed by a mini-biography of a remarkably versatile entrepreneur. "Travels" presents an Indian's view of the British conquest of India and conveys the vital role taken by Indians in the colonial process, especially as they negotiated relations with Britons both in the colonial periphery and the imperial metropole. Connoisseurs of unusual travel narratives, historians of England, Ireland, and British India, as well as literary scholars of autobiography and colonial discourse will find much in this book. But it also offers an engaging biography of a resourceful, multidimensional individual.

'The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in Italy, overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a spot enchantment lurks in it.' - Henry James In these essays on travels in Italy written from 1872 to 1909, Henry James explores art and religion, political shifts and cultural revolutions, and the nature of travel itself. James's enthusiastic appreciation of the unparalleled aesthetic allure of Venice, the vitality of Rome, and the noisy, sensuous appeal of Naples is everywhere marked by pervasive regret for the disappearance of the past and by ambivalence concerning the transformation of nineteenth-century Europe. John Auchard's lively introduction and extensive notes illuminate the surprising differences between the historical, political, and artistic Italy of James's travels and the metaphoric Italy that became the setting of some of his best-known works of fiction. This edition includes an appendix of James's book reviews on Italian travel-writing.

After living abroad for 20 years, Henry James returned to his native America and travelled down the East Coast from Boston to Florida. This a journal describing his feelings on the rediscovery of the New York of his childhood, and the growth of modern commercial America. He muses on Thoreau, Hawthorne and Emerson; in Washington, he finds a cityscape devoid of spiritual symbols; in Richmond, thoughts of the civil war haunt him. Published in 1907, this journal also served as a farewell address to the country James would never live in again.

On April 28, 1846, Francis Parkman left Saint Louis on his first expedition west. The Oregon Trail documents his adventures in the wilderness, sheds light on America's westward expansion, and celebrates the American spirit.

Dana’s account of his passage as a common seaman from Boston around Cape Horn to California, and back, is a remarkable portrait of the seagoing life. Bringing to the public’s attention for the first time the plight of the most exploited segment of the American working class, he forever changed readers’ romanticized perceptions of life at sea.

In A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain’s unofficial sequel to The Innocents Abroad, the author records his hilarious and diverse observations and insights while on a fifteen-month walking trip through Central Europe and the Alps. “Here you have Twain’s inimitable mix,” writes Dave Eggers in his Introduction, “of the folksy and the effortlessly erudite, his unshakable good sense and his legendary wit, his knack for the easy relation of a perfect anecdote, and some achingly beautiful nature writing.”

This Modern Library Paperback Classic reproduces the text of the first American edition and features new explanatory notes and a critical Afterword by Kerry Driscoll, professor of English at Saint Joseph College in Connecticut.

In 1934, famed British traveler Freya Stark sailed down the Red Sea, alighting in Aden, located at the tip of the Arabian peninsula. From this backwater outpost, Stark set forth on what was to be her most unforgettable adventure: Following the ancient frankincense routes of the Hadhramaut Valley, the most fertile in Arabia, she sought to be the first Westerner to locate and document the lost city of Shabwa. Chronicling her journey through the towns and encampments of the Hadhramaut, The Southern Gates of Arabia is a tale alive with sheikhs and sultans, tragedy and triumph. Although the claim to discovering Shabwa would not ultimately be Stark's, The Southern Gates of Arabia, a bestseller upon its original publication, remains a classic in the literature of travel. This edition includes a new Introduction by Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Stark's biographer.

Here is the adventure that started John Muir on a lifetime of discovery. Taken from his earliest journals, this book records Muir's walk in 1867 from Indiana across Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to the Gulf Coast. In his distinct and wonderful style, Muir shows us the wilderness, as well as the towns and people, of the South immediately after the Civil War.

This book offers a comprehensive survey of descriptions of Constantinople written by visitors, from the pilgrims of the Middle Ages to the European travellers and diplomats of the 18th and 19th centuries. The author examines the evidence these accounts provide for the history of the city, and for monuments which have long disappeared. In its attractive synthesis of bibliographical, archaeological and historical detail, this work is a memorial to Ebersolt's scholarship and a personal tribute to the city itself. Professor Cyril Mango has contributed a preface to this reprint of the 1918 edition.

Cooper published, eventually, five volumes of travel writings in epistolary form on his journeys around western Europe, all now available from CSP. This volume (first published with the "Switzerland" volume) relates in part to a journey along the Rhine to Switzerland (Cooper's second visit) but is also much concerned with his friendship with Lafayette.

Written in response to Charles Dickens' travels in the United States in 1842, "American Notes "is a fascinating and often highly critical portrait of the young American nation. Dickens touches on subjects as diverse as Wall Street, the American prison system, slavery, and the American press.

The essays in this collection -- a selection of papers presented at the University of Sydney Centre for Medieval Studies workshop, `Travel and Cartography from Bede to the Enlightenment' (August 22-23, 2001) - track a variety of travel narratives from the eighth century to the eighteenth. Their voyages, which extend from from the literal to the spiritual, the political, and the artistic, show how the concept of narrative mapping has changed over time, and how it encompasses cosmogony, geography, chorography, topography, and inventory. Each essay is concerned in some way with the application of the medieval geographical imagination, or with the enduring influence of that imagination upon post-medieval travel and discovery writing.This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate university students and to a broad range of academics across the disciplines of literature and history. It will be of particular interest to medievalists and scholars of the early modern period and to readers of, the new (1997) scholarly journal, Studies in Travel Writing.The volume will also appeal to a more general, informed readership interested in the history of travel and the history of ideas, early contact with indigenous people, and encounters between East and West.

This guide is an aid to Irish historians on the use of travel narratives as source-material. It features a discussion of factors that need to be considered in analyzing these narratives, notably the identity of the traveller, his or her motives for travel and writing, the period and mode of travel, the itinerary followed and the content itself. Part Two of the book comprises detailed annotations of more than 100 selected English-language narratives or accounts of journeys or tours made in Ireland from the second quarter of the 17th century to the middle of the 20th century.

Like many of his contemporaries, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle traveled extensively. This eloquent travelogue recreates in amusing detail the difficulties ordinary tourists encountered while travelling abroad, while at the same time giving a lucid picture of colonial life at the early part of the 20th century.

Cooper published, eventually, five volumes of travel writings in epistolary form on his journeys around western Europe, all now available from CSP. This volume describes his travels and observations with his family in large parts of Italy.

In 1897 the Victorian novelist George Gissing undertook a brief but eventful journey in southern Italy. His itinerary took him from Naples to Reggio di Calabria, via Paola, Cosenza, Crotone and Squillace, through the area once known as Magna Graecia. Meditating on the vestiges of Greco-Roman civilization, Gissing visited tombs and temples, museums and cathedrals, in search of the imprint of antiquity and "that old world which was the imaginative delight of my boyhood." The result was By the Ionian Sea, first published in 1901. Gissing's journey by boat, train, and carriage revealed not just the ruined glories of a classical past, but also the hardships of rural life in turn-of-the-century rural Italy. Meeting poverty-stricken peasants and corrupt local officials, he endured discomfort, danger and illness in a remote and little visited corner of Europe. Yet throughout he appreciated the warmth and generosity shown to him by local people, curious about this solitary stranger. By turns lyrical and melancholic, Gissing's masterpiece of travel writing alternates between light and dark, life and death, Paganism and Christianity. Looking at Italy in both its classical and contemporary dimensions, By the Ionian Sea celebrates Calabria's rich cultural past and beautiful landscapes while providing a candid account of the region's hardship and poverty. More than a century after its first publication, this is the first critical edition of the book in English.

In 1840, French novelist Theophile Gautier was hired by the journal "La Presse" to write regular installments of a travelogue of his journey to and around Spain. Gautier recorded his experiences and impressions and the result was the 1845 book "Voyage en Espagne" - later translated into English as "A Romantic in Spain". For Gautier, Spain promised the allure of an exotic and passionate culture; it was a revelation, he said later, like discovering his true home, the native land of his spirit. Gautier covered the olive groves of Andalucia, the vibrant street life of Madrid, the central plains of La Mancha, and the Moorish buildings of Seville and Cordoba. Gautier, travelling by mule, carriage, or wagon, came into contact with a rich panoply of people and places. Gautier reveals a Spain in transition, emerging from civil war and a feudal past into the modern world.