Why do we travel? Our contemporary ideas of travel generally concern themselves with issues of "tourism." We travel because we want to see different places; we travel for enjoyment, and because we have the leisure and the resources to do so. Our class, Travelers and Travel Liars in Latin America, has spent the last semester studying the evolution of the "traveler."
Considering a wide variety of travelers--early travelers, such as Marco Polo, explorers, colonial travelers, business travelers, scientists, and ultimately travelers who embody our more contemporary definitions of the traveler--our class has followed the evolution of the traveler through individual travel accounts. Our study culminated in this web site, Travelers in Mexico & Brazil, 1850-1950, which investigates eight travel accounts of those who traveled from the United States and Europe to these two Latin American countries, and asks why this destination was of interest to scientists, Rough Riders, housewives and authors. This particular hundred-year time period is particularly intriguing because it fuses the explorers with contemporary travelers, mixing old motives for and methods of travel with the new.
