Spa resorts were a favoured destination for affluent seekers after health and comfortable leisure in opulent surroundings from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, although in the railway age they began to suffer from competition from new fashions in leisure and tourism, especially the seaside holiday. During their heyday the leading spa resorts became hotbeds of political and diplomatic intrigue, and gathering-points for high society. As such, they also became important businesses, and distinctive, carefully-managed urban environments. ‘Taking the waters’ at a mineral springs resort fell into eclipse over much of the Western world in the mid-twentieth century, only to revive in more diffuse guise as ‘health and wellness tourism’ in the new millennium. This book examines an important body of practices and experiences from the perspectives of health, pleasure, conspicuous consumption and display, urban governance, culture and politics across a quarter of a millennium, drawing its examples not only from the British Isles, France, Spain and Central Europe, but also from the United States and Australia. An international team of distinguished historians puts this neglected theme back on the historical map, at a time when spas and their treatments have never been so popular and visible in contemporary society. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Tourism History.

The years between 1775 and 1815 constitute a crucial episode in the evolutionary history of Europe and America. Between the start of the American Revolution, with the first armed clashes between British regulars and American militiamen at Concord and Lexington, and the closing act of the French Revolution, with the eclipse of Napoleon's dreams of pan-European glory on the battlefield of Waterloo, America and Europe witnessed the rise and fall of radicalism, which left virtually no aspect of public and private life untouched. While the American colonies managed to wrench themselves away from their colonial parent, and while France careered down the stormy rapids of its own Revolution, Great Britain went through the turbulent process of redefining itself vis-à-vis both these emerging nations, and the world at large. But the period 1775 to 1815 offers more than the two ideological Revolutions that determined the face of modern America and Europe: feeding into and emanating from these Revolutions there were major watersheds in virtually all areas of cultural, intellectual and political life - varying from the rise of Romanticism to the birth of abolitionism, and from the beginnings of modern feminism to the creation of modern nationhood and its enduring cultural stereotypes. In this collection of interdisciplinary essays, historians and literary critics from both sides of the Atlantic analyze a broad spectrum of the watersheds and faultlines that arose in this formative era of Euro-American relations. Individually, the essays trace one or more of the transatlantic patterns of intellectual, cultural or scientific cross-pollination between the Old and the New World, between pre- and post-Revolutionary modes and mores. Collectively, the essays argue that the many revolutions that produced the national ideologies, identities and ideas of state of present-day America and Europe did not merely play a role in national debates, but that they very much belonged to an intricate network of transnational and, more particularly, transatlantic dialogues.

Containing original essays; historical narratives, biographical memoirs, sketches of society, topographical descriptions, novels and tales, anecdotes, select extracts from new and expensive works, the spirit of the public journals, discoveries in the arts and sciences, useful domestic hints, etc. etc. etc.