The evolution of the hotel

Kerry Howley finds interesting things in A.K. Sandoval-Strausz's Hotel: An American History:

Hotels, he argues, were "a significant episode in the modern idea of a pluralistic, cosmopolitan society," and conservatives invested in the status quo were right to fear them. Transportation advances granted people a new mobility, and traveling Americans suddenly required social mores not predicated on years of shared community bonds.

[. . .]

Hotels were a new institutional form that upset expectations about the arrangement of daily life and alarmed defenders of domesticity. They were full of beds and liquor, associated with sex, theft, and violence. Guests interacted with no patriarch — only a relatively egalitarian ecosystem of managers, porters, and bellboys. As people began to take longer and longer hotel stays in the mid-18th century, sometimes even living in them, "an entire genre of screeds against hotel living" was born, mourning the decline of traditional gender roles in a world where cooks and maids left women hopelessly idle.

None of this did much to dampen Americans' collective zeal for travel and the institutions that would house them along the way. By the end of the 19th century, the American stranger had a new role in the social order: He was a guest.