"Contemporary life is perhaps unprecedented in the scale, quantity and global organization of modern journeys, and yet it is clear that travel is not a new human experience. Mobility is the first, prehistorical human condition; sessility (attachment or fixation to one place), a later, historical condition. At the dawn of history, humans were migratory animals....

"Perhaps no nation has been as uneasy in its view of travel as America. The one Western country that has always held expatriation to be something of a misdemeanor, if not an actual offense to patriotism or a form of social betrayal, it has never freed itself of the sense of guilt apparently rooted in...