"I realized the weight of what we were doing when we first opened George Train's passport," commented Del Rio. Anthony.)Ĭurated by Lucas Mertehikian and Rodrigo Del Rio, the exhibition also follows the paper trails of other nineteenth- and twentieth-century travelers, émigrés, and refugees like Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, physicist Gertrude Neumark Rothschild, and author/activist Shirley Graham Du Bois, and calls attention to larger geopolitical issues. (This was long before he ran for president, published an obscene newsletter, or bankrolled Susan B. Issued to Train by the American Delegation in Great Britain, but written in French, which was at the time the language of international relations, this passport records his jaunts to Tuscany, Florence, and the Papal States. Train's 1857 passport is one of many such documents that went on exhibit last month in Passports: Lives in Transit at Harvard's Houghton Library. No doubt he was a well-traveled man, and here's one of his passports to prove it. I'm Phileas Fogg." Ever the competitor-and self-publicist-Train undertook a total of three trips around the world, each time attempting to beat the record. In 1870, the eccentric American transportation entrepreneur George Francis Train took a trip around the world in eighty travel days (with a two-month stopover in Paris), so when Jules Verne published his bestselling Around the World in Eighty Days in 1873, Train was quick to claim, "Verne stole my thunder.
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