Richard Harding Davis may be better remembered in late-twentieth-century America for being the son of novelist Rebecca Harding Davis than he is for his own literary accomplishments. In late-nineteenth-century America, however, Davis epitomized the American version of Charles Kingsley's ideal of Victorian manhood—the muscular Christian. Perfectly suited by temperament and training to record in his travel writings the flexing of American political and economic muscle in Central and South America and to take up uncritically such causes as the Boers' fight against the British in South Africa, Davis was so closely associated with the values of his age that his writing quickly fell out of favor shortly after his death in 1916.

Today Davis is worthy of study precisely because he so clearly represented mainstream American values in the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War I. Although his tone and...