Through a series of case studies that involve past conflict in China, the United States, The South Pacific and Europe, the nature of battlefield sites as tourist locations are explored. As places of past conflict and individual acts of heroism, these sites are places of story telling. How are these stories told? And for what purposes are the stories told? The acts and modes of interpretation are many, ranging from a discourse conducted through silences to the more complex nuanced story telling told through re-enactments of past battles. The book also asks where is the battle-field? - as case studies relate to conflicts that ranged over several hundreds of miles, to, on the other hand, acts of local civil disturbance that subsequently achieved mythic values in a history of national identity. The book is divided into 'acts', these being 'Acts of Resource Management', 'Acts of Silence', 'Acts of Discovery and Rediscovery', 'Acts of Imagination' and 'Acts of Remembrance' and embrace examples as diverse as an re-enactment of past battles on a New Zealand rural town cricket pitch to the towering strength of the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, and from the Straits of Taiwan to the centre of Canada.

Introducing real-world case studies from across the globe, Battlefield Tourism contributes to the growing fields of dark tourism, destination and risk management, and tourism security.

This book will be of interest to tourism researchers generally, but also to those researchers in the areas of cultural studies, military histories, social/human geographers and historical geographers.

In July 1936 insurgent Spanish troops organized a military coup to oust the elected Republican government in Madrid. The rebel generals expected to force a quick, clean regime change but they failed. The botched uprising turned into a bloody civil war. Hundreds of thousands died in a bitter conflict which tore the country apart and rapidly turned into the prelude for an even greater conflict yet to come--the Second World War. The siege of Madrid was the key battle of the war. The world watched and waited for the city to surrender as General Franco's Nationalist army, backed by Hitler and Mussolini, closed in on the Spanish capital. But Madrid did not fall. Madrileños fought tooth and nail to defend their city. Helped by volunteers from fifty other countries--the International Brigades--they held out against all the odds until the end of the conflict in 1939. Despite its central role in twentieth-century history, the siege of Madrid is an episode largely hidden from today's visitor. There is no guide to the war sites and few clues for the inquisitive traveller who wants to know more. Frontline Madrid fills that gap. This unique guide book explains what life was like in the city under siege and what happened in the battlefield dramas. The simple to follow maps and diagrams make it easy to visit the frontline sites. The vividly written descriptions bring events and people compellingly to life. The role of prominent individuals, British and American--Orwell, Hemingway, John Cornford is explored. Off the beaten track, from the University district in the city centre to the mountains of Guadarrama less than an hour away, the remains of the war in Madrid can still be found--gun emplacements, bunkers, trenches and occasional debris. Frontline Madrid retraces the footsteps of those who lived through the conflict to take the reader on a tour in time. The usual tourist traps are left far behind to enter the gripping world of a war which shaped modern European history.

This ground-breaking book looks at the rise of the tourism industry around the battlefields, cemeteries and memorials of the First World War.

In the aftermath of the Great War, a wave of tourists and pilgrims visited the battlefields, cemeteries and memorials of the war. The cultural history of this 'battlefield tourism' is chronicled in this absorbing and original book, which shows how the phenomenon served to construct memory in Britain, as well as in Australia and Canada. The author demonstrates that high and low culture, tradition and modernism, the sacred and the profane were often inter-related, rather than polar opposites. The various responses to the actual and imagined landscapes of battlefields are discussed, as well as bereavement and how this was shaped by gender, religion and the military experience. Individual memory and experience combined with nationalism and 'imperial' identity as powerful forces informing the pilgrim experience.But this book not only analyzes travel to battlefields, which unsurprisingly paralleled the growth of the modern tourist industry; it also looks closely at the transformation of national war memorials into pilgrimage sites, and shows how responses both to battlefields and memorials, which continue to serve as potent symbols, evolved in the years after the Great War.

Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism is the first volume to bring together a detailed analysis of professional military pilgrimage with other forms of commemorating military conflict. The volume looks beyond the discussion of battlefield tourism undertaken primarily by civilians which has dominated research until now through an analysis of the relationship between religious, military and civilian participants. Drawing on a comparative approach towards what has mostly been categorised as secular pilgrimage, dark tourism/thanatourism, military and religious tourism, and re-enactment, the contributors explore the varied ways in which memory, material culture and rituals are performed at particular places. The volume also engages with the debate about the extent to which western definitions of pilgrimage and tourism, as well as such related terms as religion, sacred and secular, can be applied in non-western contexts.