University of Mary Washington Associate Professor of History and American Studies Will Mackintosh will be featured on the With Good Reason (WGR) public radio show. The episode, Selling the Sights, will air daily starting tomorrow, Saturday, Aug. 24, and continuing through Aug. 30.

Titled after Mackintosh’s book, Selling the Sights: The Invention of the Tourist in American Culture, the show chronicles the origin and evolution of the concept of tourism, explores the ways it’s used today to develop rural communities, and more.

Published in January by NYU Press, Mackintosh’s book examines how a booming transportation industry simplified the process of getting from one place to another and led to a new type of traveler – the “tourist” – who journeys from home simply for the sake of traveling.

A summer job he held in high school as a waiter on a dinner cruise boat touring a lake lined with Gilded-Age mansions provided the impetus for his research, he told WGR host Sarah McConnell. “It just got me really interested in the way people spent their leisure time in the 19th century.” Read more.

The University of Mary Washington is a premier, selective public liberal arts and sciences university in Virginia, highly respected for its commitment to academic excellence, strong undergraduate liberal arts and sciences program, and dedication to life-long learning. The university, with a total enrollment of more than 5,000, features colleges of business, education and arts and sciences, and three campuses, including a residential campus in Fredericksburg, Va., a second one in nearby Stafford and a third in Dahlgren, Va., which serves as a center of development of educational and research partnerships between the Navy, higher education institutions and the region’s employers.