While visiting Europe In 1844, Harry McCall of Philadelphia wrote to his cousin back home of his disappointment. He didn't mind Paris, but he preferred the company of Americans to Parisians. Furthermore, he vowed to be "an American, heart and soul" wherever he traveled, but "particularly in England." Why was he in Europe if he found it so distasteful? After all, travel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was expensive, time consuming, and frequently uncomfortable.

"Being American in Europe, 1750-1860" tracks the adventures of American travelers while exploring large questions about how these experiences affected national identity. Daniel Kilbride searched the diaries, letters, published accounts, and guidebooks written between the late colonial period and the Civil War. His sources are written by people who, while prominent in their own time, are largely obscure today, making this account fresh and unusual.

Exposure to the Old World generated varied and contradictory concepts of American nationality. Travelers often had diverse perspectives because of their region of origin, race, gender, and class. Americans in Europe struggled with the tension between defining the United States as a distinct civilization and situating it within a wider world. Kilbride describes how these travelers defined themselves while they observed the politics, economy, morals, manners, and customs of Europeans. He locates an increasingly articulate and refined sense of simplicity and virtue among these visitors and a gradual disappearance of their feelings of awe and inferiority.

"A rich and diverse look at the many identities of a rich and diverse region. More than an homage to a gifted historian, it is a stand-alone, interdisciplinary inquiry into just how complicated this thing called 'the South' can be. It's all here, from literature to politics, race to religion, gender to genealogy, Old South to New--with voodoo and a doomed barge canal as added twists. Fascinating and absolutely up-to-date."--John Mayfield, author of Counterfeit Gentlemen "Honors a truly preeminent scholar with essays of very high quality and clear significance. No historian has assayed the 'southern character' more cogently than has Bertram Wyatt-Brown. From start to finish throughout this volume his former students affirm his great achievements and convincingly elaborate on them."--James Stewart, Macalester College emeritus Bertram Wyatt-Brown (b. 1932) is one of America's most recognized and quoted historians. His work on honor, war, manhood, and religion, as well as his deeply interdisciplinary approach, has profoundly influenced the way historians understand the South. The essays in this volume honor Wyatt-Brown and his work by using the concept of southern identities as a jumping-off point, examining a wide range of topics. Southern Character explores Quaker antislavery in Virginia, Lincoln's sense of southern honor, white and black uses of voodoo, contemporary southern conservatives' struggle for place, and the behavior of Confederate women during Sherman's invasion. More than a festschrift, this volume demonstrates that southern identity is plural, not monolithic, and reveals how the region's uniqueness marginalizes many populations that contribute to "southernness." Lisa Tendrich Frank is the editor of Women in the American Civil War: An Encyclopedia. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida. Daniel Kilbride, associateprofessor of history at John Carroll University, is the author of An American Aristocracy: Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia. A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller