Not Like Home: American Visitors to Britain in the 1950s
McGill-Queen's Academic Press (2019)
Late on Monday night on 5 April 1954, Juanita Stott and her neighbor India Ramsey drove from their small clapperboard homes in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Seaboard Station in Raleigh to wait for the ‘Silver Meteor’ train service to New York. Stott was 48 years old, single, a Methodist who worked as a registrar at the nearby North Carolina State College. The train was due at 1. 25 a.m. but was running late on the slow journey from Miami. This was the start of an adventure, a vacation in Europe, an event of significance. Stott’s friends marked it as such. Despite the late hour Bill Sandine, the president of her Sunday School, and Everette McDonald, another member of her church, were there to see her off. They had brought her two precious rolls of 36-exposure color film for her camera as a leaving present...
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Not Like Home will be published by McGill-Queen's Academic Press in 2019
The 1950s was a key decade in Anglo-American relations and when Americans of all classes came to Britain in large numbers for the first time. Not Like Home uses the diaries and memoirs of 'ordinary' American visitors to explore their encounters with Britain and its citizens. They found many contrasts with their life in the United States, some aspects were disappointing, some transformative. The biggest surprise was that Britons were not at all as they appeared in the movies. Chapters: Americans and Britons Archetypes and Representations Demographics of American Visitors Selling Britain’s Heritage and History Crossing the Atlantic Destinations and Travel in Britain Accommodating American Visitors Encountering the British – USAF Teenagers Encountering the British – Trip Reporters Asymmetry and Ambiguity |
