This is backstory. I'm Peter Onough. Stroll through any U.S. National Park and you're likely to encounter tourists from all over America and the world.

But in the early 20th century, Americans had to be actively persuaded to see the natural wonders here at home.

If you really love your country, if you're really patriotic, you will see America first. You won't go look to Europe.

That was just the beginning of the modern American tourism industry, which now rakes in hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

One of the places it began was in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1863, where thousands of Americans arrived just days after its famous battle.

And they want the bullets and they want the scraps of bloody clothing and they kind of want the relics that we look back at now and we're like, why would you want this?

As the summer winds down, we've got a history of American tourism today on backstory.

Major funding for backstory is provided by the Shia Khan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guys.

Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Ballow and I'm here with Ed Ayers. Ed Brian and Peter Onus with us, either Brian.

Imagine it's the mid 19th century and you open up a newspaper or magazine. You might just see an ad for a surprising tourist attraction.

Walk through the wards of an insane asylum and talk here and there with a patient.

No more interesting or profitable expedition can employ a day than a visit to the lunatic asylum.

Yes, that's right. Assilums.

Asylum tourism was a widespread and popular phenomenon that attracted thousands of visitors every year.

This is Trent University historian Janet Miran. She says this peculiar form of tourism started in the 1830s.

Throughout much of the 19th century, asylums and even prisons attracted visitors from all over the US and beyond.

They came from all over the world. France, Poland, Germany, Canada, countries and South America.

Miran says asylum administrators actively courted tourists. Visitors were invited to picnic in the well manicured gardens and take guided tours of the facilities.

They might even interact with patients.

So you may have exchanged some tobacco, trinkets of jewelry in order to have a conversation with them to hear about their history.

Visitors tasted their food.

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