Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe's Tales from the Grand Tour, 1890-1910 (Women's Diaries and Letters of the South)

"Elizabeth Sinkler Coxe's Tales from the Grand Tour, 1890-1910 is a travelogue of captivating adventures through exotic lands as experienced by an intrepid American aristocrat and her son at the dawn of the twentieth century." "Like many of their peers in the upper echelons of American society, this wealthy duo were drawn into the Egyptian craze that swept late-nineteenth-century society, and they fully immersed themselves in the nascent field of scientific archaeology. More obsessed and philanthropic than most, the Coxes not only visited the sites and monuments of ancient civilizations but also participated in digs, funded entire expeditions, and ultimately subsidized the creation of the Coxe Wing of Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. In addition to the scholarly contributions gained through their patronage, they left a vivid chronicle of camels and trains, tents and trenches, and dervishes and pyramids that has gone unpublished until now." "Her letters and recollections are complemented by numerous photographs and several original watercolor paintings. By words and pictures, Lizzie Coxe's Tales from the Grand Tour reveal the turn-of-the-century excitement about the burgeoning field of Egyptology, the intellectual pursuits available to women of means, and the familial and social ties between the upper classes of the North and South, that predated and survived the Civil War."--Jacket.