E XCEPTIONALISM AND G LOBALISM : T RAVEL W RITERS AND THE N INETEENTH -C ENTURY A MERICAN W EST D AVID M. W ROBEL Since the publication of Edward Said’s landmark study, Orientalism (1978), cultural historians have generally viewed travel writers within the theoretical contours of the postcolonial framework that Said helped construct. 1 Travel writers have been commonly characterized as the architects of imperial visions, the exoticizers, commodifiers, and objectifiers of colonized “others” who helped their readers in the imperial mother countries to understand, accept, and consume the exercise of empire. While travel writers could indeed be agents of empire, this scholarly approach has had the effect of flattening the discourse about empire in travel writing. In the postcolonialist treatment of travel writing, imperial advo- cates and critics, as well as those whose visions were marked by a great deal of ambiguity about imperial projects have been placed together, as if in harmony. However, exploring the archive of nineteenth-century travelogues about the American West reveals more cacophony than harmony. Travel writers could levy influential criticism of the empires of rival nations as well as of their own nations’ imperial projects. The ubiquitous and enormously popular travelogue form often offered readers an important countercurrent to the common notion of the American West as an exceptional place, like nowhere else on earth. Many travelers placed the West into a broader, comparative global context, viewing it as one developing frontier among many, effectively putting the West into the world and thereby de-emphasizing its regional exceptionalism. These global visions can help us David M. Wrobel is the immediate past-president of the Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society and a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. An earlier version of this article was delivered as the Presidential Address to the Phi Alpha Theta Biennial meeting in Philadelphia on 5 January 2006. 1. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).