Getting Started

Introduction

Travel & Travel Accounts in World History

Recent Scholarship on Travel Accounts

Questions to Ask

1. Who is the author of the travel account?

2. What kinds of interests motivated the traveler and the author of the travel account?

3. What form does the travel account take?

4. What topics does the author find it worthwhile to discuss?

5. What influence has the travel account had during its own and later times?

Resources

Sample Analysis: True History of the Conquest of New Spain

Annotated Bibliography

Travel Narratives Online

You Be the Historian!

About the Author

Credits

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Travel Narratives: What form does the travel account take?

This interactive exercise is designed for students. Students are presented with brief selections from several different accounts of journeys on the Congo River in the late 19th century. They are challenged to read the text carefully and think about its language, and then try to determine its form of publication.

Travel Narratives: What kinds of interests motivated the author?

This interactive exercise is designed for students. Students read three accounts of travel to India from the 1400s to the 1800s and then are asked to determine the author's motivations for writing the accounts.

Travel Narratives: Who is the author of the travel account?

This interactive exercise is designed for students. Read three travel accounts of visits to Jerusalem during the late medieval period, all by male authors. All three describe essentially the same things, but in different ways. Students are challenged to consider how the author’s gender, religious preference, age, and ethnic origin all shape how he or she writes an account, and then determine the religion and reason for traveling of the author of each account.