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Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California

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Examines the myth of Ramona in the regional tourist history

Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California
Dydia DeLyser
Manufacturer: Univ Of Minnesota Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Hospitality, Travel & Tourism | Industries & Professions | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

North America | Travel | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0816645728

The most important woman in the history of southern California never lived. The eponymous heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson's popular 1884 novel Ramona, a half-Indian beauty raised on a wealthy Mexican rancho, nonetheless left an indelible imprint on southern California's landscape. Within a year of its publication, landmarks identified with Ramona's fictional life - her birthplace, her home, the site of her wedding, and her grave - became important, even canonical parts of a visit to southern California. One could take the Ramona freeway to town, cook like Ramona, and smell like Ramona. The novel's romanticized version of California's Hispanic past also inspired films, songs, musical instruments, jewelry, clothes, beer, wine, canned goods, collectibles, and a play that still draws thirty thousand people annually. Although historians and other writers have acknowledged Ramona's importance in the shaping of southern California's regional identity, there has never been an in-depth study of the origins and evolution of the "Ramona Myth" itself - until now. In Ramona Memories, Dydia DeLyser traces the myth's emergence within the context of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tourist industry. DeLyser explores the establishment of tourist attractions by fans of the novel. She details the stories of individual Ramona enthusiasts who, guided by numerous travel books and articles, wove the text of the novel and its lavishly described locations into their own lives, from pilgrimages to either of the two ranchos acclaimed as Ramona's home to Ramona-themed luncheons and hopeful honeymoon visits to the Wishing Well at her marriage place. Based on more than a decade of meticulous research, Ramona Memories reveals how a fiction - and the real places and products that it inspired - helped to make an idealized past visible, permeating southern California's social memory.

As for usefulness, having not been revised in over 20 years, the guide to house museums and parks is no longer reliable. While the pleasure in reading the essays is unsurpassed, and while the perspective is original and rekindles interest in some aspects of these writers and their works that may be lost to footnotes, most of the information is no longer groundbreaking for scholars or biographers. The black and white photographs have darkened in the aged paperback edition, too.

Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Highway Guide: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, USA

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Historic Travel Reading

Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Highway Guide: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, USA
Mike Gleue
Manufacturer: Xlibris Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Reference | Books & Reading | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Guidebooks | Reference & Tips | Travel | Subjects | Books

The journey is broken down into sections that highlight a few places to visit in each area. Starting in Wisconsin's Upper Coulee Country & Mississippi River Valley, to the Mississippi Valley & Bluff Country of Minnesota & Iowa, then to the Minnesota River Valley and finally the Prairies of Minnesota & South Dakota. Interesting period history and some geographic information is given on these regions throughout the pages, which also exhibits a good share of black and white pictures. After these chapters come a few notes on Festivals & Pageants in certain towns along the route. Then the author talks about different travel option ideas for interest, such as small convoy camping or large group motor coach tours. At the back of the book is a quick reference list mainly giving phone numbers and some other contact information for towns & cities in each of the previously mentioned areas.

The book is fairly decent but meager and it really may not be what you expect. It provides very little in direct help on planning a trip (recommended places to eat or stay) but does gives a "lengthy" explanation of the Dakota Conflict of 1862. It's just as much, or maybe even more so, a book of U.S. history facts, findings and events as it is of an actual travel guide.