What I Saw in America

In 1921, G.K. Chesterton, an Englishman, lectured throughout the United States. The following year, he published this record of his impressions. "I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind," begins Chesterton, giving us some inkling of the aphoristic delights in store. He offers amusing insights on the architecture of American hotels and the real reasons for Prohibition. His purview also includes slavery, the Irish in America, the decline of the British Empire, Abraham Lincoln and the American businessman. Some of his conclusions are prophetic and others, we can say with hindsight, are wrong-headed, but refreshing.