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This article demonstrates the value of scalable reading of historical travel guides, combining traditional close reading with computer-assisted distant reading. Aiming to scrutinize the persistence of older tourist attractions under communism, we analyse guidebooks intended for similar audiences but produced under different political regimes. More specifically, we compare three travel guides to the same geographical area produced between 1905 and 1959: one to communist cold war Czechoslovakia, one to democratic interwar Czechoslovakia, and one to the Habsburg-era Czech lands and Slovakia. We analyse the geographic distribution of attractions by geolocating the guidebook toponyms and visualizing them with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This distant reading is complemented with a hermeneutic analysis grounded in a close reading of the guidebook text. The combination of these approaches documents the similarities in the symbolic representation of the country's attractions across political caesuras and provides a methodological template for future explorations of travel guides with historical GIS. This article demonstrates the value of scalable reading of historical travel guides, combining traditional close reading with computer-assisted distant reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catchy slogans about tourism's peace-promoting qualities abound – 'passport to peace', 'a vital force for peace' and 'the peace industry', to name but a few. Yet, despite the critical scrutiny of the peace–tourism nexus in recent decades, its historical roots remain unexplored. This article traces the origins of the idea that tourism can help advance peace and international understanding. It examines the aspirations of the various international tourist organisations founded during the interwar and early post-war period. While these organisations sought to foster peaceful relations across national and cultural borders, their discourse of tourism as a force for peace also gave legitimacy to a transnational tourist industry and government attempts to secure hard currency in the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the transnational production processes of foreign correspondence in the Cold War. It examines the double role of foreign correspondents as reporters and Cold War political agents. Recent scholarship has explored the activities of Western correspondents reporting from the Communist world. Little is known, however, about Eastern bloc correspondents in the West. Drawing on the rarely studied files on East German foreign correspondents held by the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, the article problematizes the image of GDR journalists as obedient intelligence officers and highlights the dilemmas of journalists deployed to defend national interests. Focusing on the Nordic countries in the mid1970s, the article provides detailed insights into the politics and practices of East German foreign correspondence before the digital revolution. The article thus shows the benefits of going beyond the traditional focus on media content to analyse the daily practices as well as the political and symbolic significance of journalism. It contributes to the growing historical research on foreign correspondents and the media in East Germany and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]