从柏林围墙到西班牙的海滩，从罗马的西班牙阶梯到伊斯坦堡的布丁老店，作者Jobs述说这些背包客故事，这些年轻人对自由移动的渴望让欧洲的人民和空间达到前所未有的紧密。
随着越来越多年轻人徒步旅游欧洲大陆，真正的国际青年文化也开始出现，这样的结果就是，即使在冷战的紧张局势时期，人们间的联系和生活却更紧密。作者研究了八个国家、五种语言的珍贵档案，并对这一时期在当代对边界和移民问题上的相关性进行了深入的分析与评论。《背包客大使》巧妙地让我们重新看到，这个在当时远比徒步旅行者自己所理解，更有影响力及重要性的运动。
本书好评
Detlef Siegfried, University of Copenhagen
“Backpack Ambassadors marks a true breakthrough in the international history of tourism, particularly because it develops a completely new and convincing approach for our understanding of European integration from 1945 to the present. By linking this important political topic to the everyday practices of youths, Jobs allows us to see it as a result of societal and cultural developments beyond the political sphere rather than a process triggered by initiatives of anonymous European institutions. This is a brilliant book.”
Tara Zahra | author of The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World
“Backpack Ambassadors is a ‘bottom-up’ history of the construction of ‘Europe’ as both a political and cultural unit. It offers an account of the history Europe and the European Union that is not dominated by bureaucrats or diplomats, but by the youth who created ‘Europe’ as they moved through its hostels and railways stations. Jobs has written a model of new transnational history, drawing on extensive research in multiple languages, countries, and archives to make a very convincing case for how the movement of youth across national frontiers shaped several of the major political developments of the postwar era—from postwar reconstruction to Cold War politics, the reconciliation of Germany and France to the social protests of the 1960s, and of course, European unification.”
Anne Gorsuch, author of All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin
“Jobs’s lively, ambitious, transnational history of youth travel examines the transformative impact of mass travel on post-war Europe. Jobs takes us on a fascinating ride from the optimistic internationalism of the 1950s hostel movement, through the rebellious international youth culture of the 1960s, to the development of an iconic form of backpacking—complete with Let’s Go guidebooks—still prevalent today. We see how scores of independent, often idealistic young men and women traveling from Birmingham to Berlin to Budapest gave shape to a new kind of travel culture, a new international youth culture, and, most importantly, to new ‘Europeanized’ social space.”
Akira Iriye, Harvard University
“This is an excellent study of what the author calls ‘transnational youth culture.’ It brings together two of the most important recent trends in the study of modern history: tracing transnational relationships, and examining youth as a key category. Historians have been seeking to transcend the traditional framework of the nation state in examining the past, and they have increasingly stressed the importance of documenting cross-border connections among non-national categories of people, such as gender, ethnicity, and age. Jobs adds to and vastly expands this important historiographic development. There are new data and fresh perspectives on virtually every page. The book makes required reading for all people, young and old, who are seeking to understand where humanity stands today.”
关于作者
Richard Ivan Jobs是奥勒冈太平洋大学的历史教授。他是Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War 一书的作者及Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century一书的共同编辑。
