All Aboard!
MUN History facutly member Dominque Bregent-Heald has published as essay in a special issue of the American Review of Canadian Studies honouring John Herd Thompson.
The article is titled, "All Aboard! Travel Films, Railroads, and the North American West, 1897鈥1910鈥 in American Review of Canadian Studies , , 2015 has been published on Taylor & Francis Online. It is available at:
The abstract reads as follows:
Beginning with the first travelogues of the late 1890s, the film and tourism industries collaborated both directly and indirectly to shape representations of North America鈥檚 western landscape and its people. These non-narrative motion pictures intersected with the rise of mass consumerism, modern tourism, the forces of imperialism and colonialism, as well as industrialized forms of transportation. In particular, railroad travel films from the Canadian Pacific Railway Company and the Northern Pacific Railway Company transformed motion-picture goers into armchair tourists, exposing audiences to the scenic wonders of the West. These transcontinental railroads, themselves products of nation-building initiatives, competed against one another to increase passenger traffic by marketing the sublime and often overlapping landscapes of the American and Canadian Wests as potent nationalist and unifying symbols that heralded each country鈥檚 uniqueness.