Leisure, Travel and Mass Culture: The History of Mass Tourism

Leisure, Travel and Mass Culture is a collection of digitized primary sources documenting the development of mass tourism from the mid-19th through the 20th century. Highlights include:

• Records of international travel agency Thomas Cook
• Material on iconic seaside resorts, such as Coney Island, Rockaway Beach, and Blackpool
• Early accounts of the “American Grand Tour” describing the birth of American vacations
• Guides to wilderness tourism destinations such as Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the White Mountains
• Promotional films from the 1930s-1960s encouraging leisure travel
• Marketing materials showing growth of international package travel in the 1960-1980s

Material types include travel diaries and journals, correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, guidebooks, film, posters, postcards, brochures, maps, prints, and illustrations. The original documents are from museums, libraries, and archives around the world.