Americans have a new relationship with the world— and the feeling is mutual

Americans have long had a conflict of sorts about travel. At times, we've felt that home was the last best place on earth, a nearly sacred, unsurpassable "homeland." At other times, we've seemed to want to remake the world in the image of home, appreciating some of its otherness, sure, but also perceiving it through a judgmental prism of American standards. But another chapter may now be unfolding: More and more of us seem to be circulating throughout the globe with an ebullience, a sophistication, and a freedom of spirit that could well mark a New Age of American Travel.

It was, of course, the most American of writers, Mark Twain, who in 1869 made the ultimate prescient brief for this new age: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts." Twain knew his nation. "Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." Today, Americans appear increasingly ready to reject wariness toward the rest of the world. Something new is afoot—a rediscovery of the sheer pleasure of being abroad and a resurgence of pride in being curious, culturally aware, peripatetic Americans. The evidence is anecdotal, but not entirely. In a recent Condé Nast Traveler poll, 84 percent of respondents said that the potential for "new and different cultural experiences" was highly important in choosing where to travel now—a meaningful response in the midst of a recession. These trying times may well come with an attitudinal silver lining: We have a new sense of balance on the world stage, an awareness of being a great nation still but no longer the only economic superpower. Whatever weight of symbolism was implicit in every border crossing—the mighty Americans cometh!—has been ever so slightly lifted, and we have a fresh sense of proportion as we judge ourselves against others.

Much has contributed to this—geopolitics, finance, technology, and communications. Significantly, we have learned to live and travel in a new dimension, on the World Wide Web. The real-time relationship between, say, New York, Washington, and Los Angeles on the one hand, and Beijing, Jakarta, and Tehran on the other, is a first, and it is leading, inevitably, to a more shared world.

Some of the exuberance we are sensing may derive from a new First Family that is as enthusiastic a globe-traveling bunch as any in American history. They are a reassertion of a particularly appealing aspect of the American character—social energy. There was a wonderful, impish nonchalance in the sight of Sasha Obama's bare feet at the Vatican. Not everyone approved, but there was no denying their general wiggling statement: Hi!

Service workers in Egypt's travel industry have always liked Americans, I've been told, because we are thought to be more generous than other nationalities. (Italians are popular because they're cheerful—but cheer only goes so far.) In the last few months, the like appears to have swelled into a little love fest. Susan Hack, this magazine's Cairo-based correspondent (a native of Chicago), tells me that the underlying issues which have angered and disappointed Egyptians about America—political differences, cultural hegemony—continue to irk. But immigration officials have been smiling at her more. When she asked a man in the souk what he thought about Barack Obama, he replied, "It's me who should be asking you what you think about Obama."