Unspeakable Awfulness: America Through the Eyes of European Travelers, 1865-1900

Dr. Kenneth Rose 
Faculty, History Department, 
CSU, Chico 

European travelers descended upon the United States in droves after the Civil War ended in 1865. They encountered a society and a landscape that sometimes resembled their own, but could also be strikingly different.  Dr. Rose’s talk emphasizes aspects of the United States that these travelers found to be most foreign to their experience, including the wilderness of the American West, gun use in the United States, and American notions of class. Many famous European authors visited and wrote about what they saw – sometimes in horror – including Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Lewis Stevenson. At the time of this presentation, Dr. Rose was completing a book with the same title (Published by Routledge, 2013). 

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Recorded: March 14, 2013