Battlefield Tourism

Through a series of case studies that involve past conflict in China, the United States, The South Pacific and Europe, the nature of battlefield sites as tourist locations are explored. As places of past conflict and individual acts of heroism, these sites are places of story telling. How are these stories told? And for what purposes are the stories told? The acts and modes of interpretation are many, ranging from a discourse conducted through silences to the more complex nuanced story telling told through re-enactments of past battles. The book also asks where is the battle-field? - as case studies relate to conflicts that ranged over several hundreds of miles, to, on the other hand, acts of local civil disturbance that subsequently achieved mythic values in a history of national identity. The book is divided into 'acts', these being 'Acts of Resource Management', 'Acts of Silence', 'Acts of Discovery and Rediscovery', 'Acts of Imagination' and 'Acts of Remembrance' and embrace examples as diverse as an re-enactment of past battles on a New Zealand rural town cricket pitch to the towering strength of the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, and from the Straits of Taiwan to the centre of Canada.

This book will be of interest to tourism researchers generally, but also to those researchers in the areas of cultural studies, military histories, social/human geographers and historical geographers.

The Darker Side of Travel is a contemporary and comprehensive analysis of dark tourism. Drawing on existing literature, numerous examples and introducing new conceptual perspectives, it develops a theoretically informed foundation for examining the demand for and supply of dark tourism experiences. It also explores issues relevant to the development, management and interpretation of visitor sites and attractions associated with death, disaster and suffering.

Introducing real-world case studies from across the globe, Battlefield Tourism contributes to the growing fields of dark tourism, destination and risk management, and tourism security.

In the aftermath of the Great War, a wave of tourists and pilgrims visited the battlefields, cemeteries and memorials of the war. The cultural history of this 'battlefield tourism' is chronicled in this absorbing and original book, which shows how the phenomenon served to construct memory in Britain, as well as in Australia and Canada. The author demonstrates that high and low culture, tradition and modernism, the sacred and the profane were often inter-related, rather than polar opposites. The various responses to the actual and imagined landscapes of battlefields are discussed, as well as bereavement and how this was shaped by gender, religion and the military experience. Individual memory and experience combined with nationalism and 'imperial' identity as powerful forces informing the pilgrim experience.But this book not only analyzes travel to battlefields, which unsurprisingly paralleled the growth of the modern tourist industry; it also looks closely at the transformation of national war memorials into pilgrimage sites, and shows how responses both to battlefields and memorials, which continue to serve as potent symbols, evolved in the years after the Great War.

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, http://www.uni-jena.de/, language: English, abstract: This contribution is aimed at exploring the reasons why people from all over the world have been visiting France and Belgium, to see the old battlefields of the Western Front of the Great War over the last hundred years. What motivations did or do they have? Is it a general interest in historic places or do the visitors have a personal connection to the places because they have fought there or have lost a loved one there? Does a real tourism to the former battlefields exist at all? As a single term paper cannot be enough to answer all these questions in detail, the focus will be set on the British visitors. It be will be examined what war tourism, or rather battlefield tourism, entails and how it developed after the Armistice. Finally, selected guidebooks and their typical features will be presented and how they prepare visitors for their journey into the past. Despite the Great War being over for more than 100 years, the promise of remembering its dead is still fulfilled. The idea for this term paper came from a book that has been on my shelf for quite some time now. In "Traces de la Grande Guerre" J.S. Cartier has captured what is left of the Western Front during the 1990s in black and white photographs, supplemented by short informative texts on the location or the picture itself. I was surprised at the recency of the book, and how much is actually left of the war and omnipresent - not only in hidden places.

Introducing real-world case studies from across the globe, Battlefield Tourism contributes to the growing fields of dark tourism, destination and risk management, and tourism security.

This ground-breaking book looks at the rise of the tourism industry around the battlefields, cemeteries and memorials of the First World War.