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Existing scholarship overestimates the Italian Grand Tour but underplays a wider culture of educational travel. Continental experience was far more common among the gentry and nobility of Britain and Ireland than is usually thought, as young men pursued diverse forms of travel that must be understood as part of family strategy. Different journeys emerged from trade-offs between means, ambitions and obligations, but culminated in the popularisation of continental educational travel between 1650 and 1750. This period was distinctive for the pursuit of French culture in France and neighbouring territories, rather than for the ‘lure of Italy’. Time abroad became crucial to both social mobility and elite formation: it was an investment for the ambitious and a requirement for the established, helping the sons of British and Irish landed families to become men, gentlemen and Englishmen. This conclusion considers avenues for further research within an expanded field of educational mobility, including the experiences of girls and Scottish families. It ends with the place of educational travel in wider European engagement, charting the decline of this form after 1750, tracing its successors through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and considering its implications for what might come next.

Chapter 3 considers the myriad nature of southern memoir, with particular focus on the anti-racist work of Lillian Smith. Published in a decade replete with southerners writing about the South, including W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, William Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream confronts southern paternalism in a stark, direct manner. Specifically, Smith responds to many of her contemporaries by presenting the South not as a romantic site of gentility, but rather as a psychologically traumatizing hellscape, one replete with specters of violence perpetrated against blacks as well as paternalistic control levied against women and poor whites. This chapter contextualizes Smith alongside these other writers, with primary focus on Percy's nostalgia and romanticization of southern gentility, as well as his disdain for poor whites, whom he derides as scoundrels and markedly inferior versions of whiteness.

This chapter focuses on the rise of “genteel sport,” a particular brand of sporting culture that emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century as part of a broader effort to craft and unite a colonial elite. After detailing the unstratified nature of colonial sporting culture before genteel sport emerged, the chapter moves on to outline how business – not just social standing – united the investors in genteel sporting culture and how they aimed to inspire deference through the architecture and structure of new sporting events, including new venues and professional performers as well as new activities and new rules for older ones. Yet the chapter closes by citing the financial difficulties faced by the new professionals, and suggests that their commercial needs and investors’ own desires to win ran contrary to the magnanimous beneficence elites had intended to project through genteel sport.

Chapter Two covers the same time period as Chapter One, but draws from newspapers and letters instead of financial records to emphasize the perspective of participants rather than investors. The result is that readers see how investors failed to create the spatial and behavioral distinction they desired, and so any attempt to claim exclusive gentility triggered aggravation and social conflict rather than awe and deference. This result was also influenced by the imperial crisis going on at the same time, which emphasized notions of “liberty” and “equality” and so made common people less likely to accept efforts to craft distinction in public settings such as sporting events. The chapter closes by examining how the imperatives of running a popular insurgency led the Continental Congress to essentially ban genteel sport as part of its Articles of Association in 1774.

Chapter Three moves ahead from the Revolution, covering the period from the 1780s to the 1820s. In this “early national” era, elite investors decided to try again to craft genteel sport, though they changed its format from aiming to establish elites through non-remunerative sponsorship and distinctive space and behavior to requiring them to earn distinction by contributing to the commercial growth of their communities. As a result, sporting events became more thoroughly commercial than ever before and investors increasingly ran them as “capitalists” who centralized their control over the assets and profits required to produce sporting activities. The chapter concludes by making clear that the second effort to produce genteel sport was national in scale, despite regional differences over slavery that affected certain sporting experiences.