The introduction of paid holidays during the interwar years democratized travel and laid the foundation for modern mass tourism. In European democracies, the right to paid leave found supporters from across the political spectrum who viewed it a means to improve the health of the labor force, increase industrial output, and safeguard family values. Workers also gained new leisure opportunities in countries without a state regulated right to paid holidays. Moral entrepreneurs debated how to combat idleness and ensure workers use their new leisure time in productive ways. Social tourism subsidized by the state or NGOs, and catering to those disadvantaged by poverty or poor health thus tended to involve education and moral guidance. The sustained postwar economic growth experienced by liberal democracies largely made this form of tourism obsolete because workers could afford commercial package tours meeting consumerist holiday ideals.

The post-war boom in international travel made tourism a question for international diplomacy. Focusing on the growth of bilateral tourism agreements during the Cold War, this article shows how the meaning of tourism was negotiated by and between governments on either side of the East–West divide. While previous research on tourism in the Cold War has focused on the threat tourist traffic posed to national security in socialist states, the present study also considers the dilemmas it presented to liberal democracies. The article analyses the intersections of tourism with issues of foreign trade, cultural exchange and human contacts, which shaped the contestations over tourism throughout the Cold War.

Tourism history is witnessing a surge of new research, which means that this is a good time to pause and reflect on the historiographical development of this field over the past decades. This article retraces the genealogy of historical tourism scholarship, revisits some of the classics in the field, and reviews the latest developments in the global historiography on tourism. Furthermore, the article also shows how the field has always engaged in productive, mutual exchanges with other disciplines, including sociology, ethnology, and comparative literature, and with adjacent historical fields such as global history, gender history, and diplomatic history. It also argues that while researchers for a long time were in agreement when seeing tourism as an inherently modern phenomenon, recent research on European antiquity and the Song dynasty has prompted a new debate on the nature of tourism. The empirical emphasis of most tourism history nevertheless remains on the period after 1850, and the article ends by staking out the latest trends in this field, such as the embrace of digital methods and the study of so-called travellees – those on the receiving end of tourism who facilitate or merely witness their home becoming a destination for mass travel.

This paper argues for an expanded view of research infrastructure. Drawing on our experiences leading the research platform DigitalHistory@Lund, it shows how research capacity can be unlocked “bottom-up”, by providing scholars with comparatively cheap—yet often inaccessible— technological support. By engaging researchers in digitally enabled scholarly practices, the platform yielded a multiplying effect that has seen participants produce highly competitive grant applications and eventually bring home external funding currently worth eight times the platform’s original costs. The platform thus demonstrates the importance of “immaterial” infrastructure in the sense of basic organisational structures that facilitate collaboration and communication.

Mediehistoria är ett snabbt växande fält som omfattar mer än studier av medieteknologier eller institutioner som press, radio och tv. I antologin visar författarna på styrkorna med att använda ett brett mediebegrepp och analyserar i boken allt från vardagsnära trycksaker till transnationella politiska fenomen med exempel tagna ur bl.a. spiritistiska seanser, gallupundersökningar och Ikeakataloger.