"A historian's vivid portrait of the expanding American nation based on the accounts of eight 19th-century British travelers who famously explored its geographic and cultural landscape." "In this illuminating volume of social and political history, author James C. Simmons revisits the America encountered not only by Dickens and Wilde but also by Frances Trollope, whose acid tome on barbarous Cincinnati made her a London literary sensation in 1832; by the celebrated English actress Fanny Kemble, whose two years on a Georgia plantation turned her into a passionate abolitionist; by George Ruxton in the pristine wilderness of the Colorado Territory in 1846 and, just fourteen years later, Richard Burton on his journey by stagecoach across the Great Plains where, unmythically, herds of buffalo no longer roamed." "Simmons's lively historical narrative follows the path, too, to William Howard Russell, the celebrated London Times correspondent who by accident covered the outbreak of the Civil War, and chronicles as well the many colorful adventures Frank Harris experienced in the flannel and chaps of a real-life Texas cowboy."--Jacket.