Hilary Brown has filed television reports from every continent except Antarctica. She was once profiled on TVO’s ‘The Agenda’ as ‘Canada’s best-ever female foreign correspondent.’ This embarrasses her. She was one of the last journalists to be lifted by helicopter from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1975, during the Communist takeover of South Vietnam. One of her ABC reports later appeared in the motion picture ‘The Deer Hunter’ in what Brown calls her ‘fifteen seconds of fame.’ During the 1980’s she was an Anchor for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto, an experience she describes as ‘death by hairspray.’ She later returned to ABC News for another 18 years to do the work she loved best: foreign news reporting. She was married to the British biographer and BBC correspondent John Bierman, who she met in Pakistan during the Indo-Pak war of 1971. He became her mentor, best friend, and father of her only child. Their life together, in half a dozen countries over three decades, is a great love story that only ended with his death in 2006. As a widow, Brown continued to work at what she calls ‘the best job in the world’ before she finally hung up her trench coat. Two years later she fell in love with a Canadian businessman who, until the global pandemic, flew her around the world in the relentless pursuit of pseudo-extreme sports for which she was totally unqualified. She says he keeps her in a constant state of excitement and fear, which is just like being a foreign correspondent, all over again. Foreign correspondents are like war tourists in flak jackets,’ she writes. ‘They document human misery, and then move on.’ But many are left with the emotional baggage of guilt, and a search for atonement. This is one of the many themes in Brown’s lively memoir, and it’s quite a ride. To readers of all ages, but especially her own, her message is that life is never over... until it’s over.

As German troops entered Paris following their victory in June 1940, the American journalist William L. Shirer observed that they carried cameras and behaved as "naïve tourists." One of the first things Hitler did after his victory was to tour occupied Paris, where he was famously photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower. Focusing on tourism by German personnel, military and civil, and French civilians during the war, as well as war-related memory tourism since, War Tourism addresses the fundamental linkages between the two. As Bertram M. Gordon shows, Germans toured occupied France by the thousands in groups organized by their army and guided by suggestions in magazines such as Der Deutsche Wegleiter fr Paris [The German Guide for Paris]. Despite the hardships imposed by war and occupation, many French civilians continued to take holidays. Facilitated by the Popular Front legislation of 1936, this solidified the practice of workers' vacations, leading to a postwar surge in tourism. After the end of the war, the phenomenon of memory tourism transformed sites such as the Maginot Line fortresses. The influx of tourists with links either directly or indirectly to the war took hold and continues to play a significant economic role in Normandy and elsewhere. As France moved from wartime to a postwar era of reconciliation and European Union, memory tourism has held strong and exerts significant influence across the country.

This is the first volume to fully explore the complex relationship between war and tourism by considering its full range of dynamics; including political, psychological, economic and ideological factors at different levels, in different political and geographical locations. Issues of peace and tourism are dealt with insofar as they pertain to the effects of war on tourism that emerge after the cessation of hostilities. The book therefore reveals how not only location, but also political strategies, accidents of history, transportation linkages, and economic expediency all have played their role in the development and continuation of tourism before, during, and after wartime. It further show how the effects of war are seldom if ever simply a negation or reversal of the effects of peace on tourism. The volume draws on a range of examples, from medieval times to the present, to reveal the multi-faceted development of tourism amidst and because of conflict in a wide variety of locations, including the Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, North America, Africa and South East Asia, showing the diverse ways in which tourism and war interacts. In doing so it explores how some locations have been developed as tourist attractions primarily because of war and conflict, e.g. as resting and training places for troops, and others flourished because of the threat of danger from conflicts to more traditional tourist locations. This thought provoking volume contributes to the understanding of the interrelationships between war, peace and tourism in many different parts of the world at different scales. It will be valuable reading for all those interested in this topic as well as dark tourism, battlefield tourism and heritage tourism.

Martha Langford and John Langford examine their father's apparently innocuous photographic experience, revealing the complexity of both the images and their creator. An intelligent and personal look at the ways that the historical and the private are represented and remembered, A Cold War Tourist and His Camera stages the family slide show as you've never seen it before.

Focusing on Western tourism behind the Iron Curtain, this chapter introduces the main research questions addressed in the volume: firstly, how and why Eastern Europe became a tourist destination for citizens of the West; secondly what impact this had on the development of a tourism industry in the Eastern bloc; and thirdly to what extent the experiences of Western tourists in Eastern Europe influenced mutual perceptions and Cold War stereotypes of “the other”. The chapter situates these questions in three debates in recent historiography: the history of transnational tourism, of the cultural Cold War, and of mobilities in the supposedly backward and static societies in Eastern Europe.

In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of "ghost tours," frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. "Dark tourism" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they continue to feed problematic "Old South" narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work, Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are still with us.

This original and fresh book explores Okinawa's makeover as a tourist mecca in the long historical shadow and among the physical ruins of the Pacific War's most devastating land battle. Gerald Figal considers how a place burdened by a history of semicolonialism, memories of war and occupation, economic hardship, and contentious current political affairs has reshaped itself into a resort destination. Drawing on an innovative mix of detailed archival research and extensive fieldwork, Gerald Figal considers the ways Okinawa has accommodated war experience and its legacies within the manufacture and promotion of both a "tropical paradise" image and a heritage tourism site identified with the premodern Ryukyu Kingdom. Tracing the postwar formation of "Tourist Okinawa," Figal addresses interrelated issues of economic sustainability, local political autonomy, interregional and international relations, environmental preservation, historical and cultural self-representation, and especially Okinawa's role as a global peace site laboring under the legacies of war. From the end of World War Two to the present, the author follows Okinawa's evolution through three main themes: war memorialization, tourism-influenced environmental and historical restoration, and invasion and occupation represented by U.S. military bases and beach resorts. Creatively, accessibly, and eloquently written, this compelling work highlights a set of islands that represent key issues facing contemporary Japan.

Martha Langford and John Langford examine their father's apparently innocuous photographic experience, revealing the complexity of both the images and their creator. An intelligent and personal look at the ways that the historical and the private are represented and remembered, A Cold War Tourist and His Camera stages the family slide show as you've never seen it before.

In Tours of Vietnam, Scott Laderman demonstrates how tourist literature has shaped Americans’ understanding of Vietnam and projections of United States power since the mid-twentieth century. Laderman analyzes portrayals of Vietnam’s land, history, culture, economy, and people in travel narratives, U.S. military guides, and tourist guidebooks, pamphlets, and brochures. Whether implying that Vietnamese women were in need of saving by “manly” American military power or celebrating the neoliberal reforms Vietnam implemented in the 1980s, ostensibly neutral guides have repeatedly represented events, particularly those related to the Vietnam War, in ways that favor the global ambitions of the United States. Tracing a history of ideological assertions embedded in travel discourse, Laderman analyzes the use of tourism in the Republic of Vietnam as a form of Cold War cultural diplomacy by a fledgling state that, according to one pamphlet published by the Vietnamese tourism authorities, was joining the “family of free nations.” He chronicles the evolution of the Defense Department pocket guides to Vietnam, the first of which, published in 1963, promoted military service in Southeast Asia by touting the exciting opportunities offered by Vietnam to sightsee, swim, hunt, and water-ski. Laderman points out that, despite historians’ ongoing and well-documented uncertainty about the facts of the 1968 “Hue Massacre” during the National Liberation Front’s occupation of the former imperial capital, the incident often appears in English-language guidebooks as a settled narrative of revolutionary Vietnamese atrocity. And turning to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, he notes that, while most contemporary accounts concede that the United States perpetrated gruesome acts of violence in Vietnam, many tourists and travel writers still dismiss the museum’s display of that record as little more than “propaganda.”