Traveling Europe between the World Wars is a study of "armchair" travel writers who journeyed to Europe during the interwar period of 1919-1939. They traveled the continent for two main reasons: to chronicle the political and social upheavals of the age through encounters with "ordinary" Europeans and to revel in the legendary, idyllic Europe of their earthly dreams. As post-World War I traumas, the Great Depression, and the sudden rise of fascist and communist ideologies wracked the continent, the writers were struck by how many people felt another world war was inevitable. This study focuses on travel conversations writers experienced on trains, along roadsides, or in cafes, homes, and inns as they sought the real Europe stripped of press reports and government propaganda. What they found was a continent in transition-where a cherished past was colliding with an ominous future.

Traveling India in the Age of Gandhi is a study of "armchair" travel writers who journeyed to India during what has often been termed the "Age of Gandhi," placed between 1914-1948. Most of the travel writers surveyed understood this era to be a unique time in world history-in India and elsewhere on the globe. The lingering trauma of World War I, the rise of radical state ideologies in Russia, Italy, Japan, and Germany, world-wide depression in the 1930s along with a host of other unsettling political, cultural, and technological realities revealed a world of bewildering complexity and uncertainty. For many of the travel writers surveyed in this work, India was the main drama in a shifting global landscape. Moreover, many viewed it as the ultimate travel experience, a journey that tested one's capacity to fully engage the earth's most compelling forms of human diversity and suffering. Although a few notable figures are included, most of the authors in the study constitute a breed of largely forgotten travel writers. This work is an attempt to extract the core of their observations, impressions, and conclusions concerning what they saw and experienced, particularly concerning Indian aspirations for independence and India as the world's most exotic human landscape.