Children's Nature

The Rise of the American Summer Camp

Leslie Paris

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9780814767825
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814767504
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

For over a century, summer camps have provided many American children's first experience of community beyond their immediate family and neighborhoods. Each summer, children experience the pain of homesickness, learn to swim, and sit around campfires at night.
Children's Nature chronicles the history of the American summer camp, from its invention in the late nineteenth century through its rise in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Leslie Paris investigates how camps came to matter so greatly to so many Americans, while providing a window onto the experiences of the children who attended them and the aspirations of the adults who created them.
Summer camps helped cement the notion of childhood as a time apart, at once protected and playful. Camp leaders promised that campers would be physically and morally invigorated by fresh mountain air, simple food, daily swimming, and group living, and thus better fit for the year to come. But camps were important as well because children delighted in them, helped to shape them, and felt transformed by them. Focusing primarily on the northeast, where camps were first founded and the industry grew most extensively, and drawing on a range of sources including camp films, amateur performances, brochures, oral histories, letters home, industry journals, camp newspapers, and scrapbooks, Children's Nature brings this special and emotionally resonant world to life.

Index

Abbott, William, 65, 184

“Acting out,” 143–50, 235

by camp counselors, 148–50, 161–62

camp staff toleration for, 161–62

pranks and, 146–47, 171, 252, 316n54

punishment for, 143–45, 150, 315n45

rule breaking in, 144–46, 148

social aggression and, 147–48, 316n62

Adams, Elizabeth Kemper, 152, 318n85

Adirondack tourism, 24, 185

Adirondack Woodcraft Camp, 65, 104, 122, 136, 184, 185, 187, 202, 277

Adolescence: camp attendance and, 109–10, 308nn37–39

concept of, 18, 27–28

counselor-in-training programs in, 110

girls and, 46, 127, 150, 294n113, 317n78

heterosexual attraction in, 152

same-sex intimacy in, 152–54

sexual maturation in, 150, 317n78

“teenage” culture of, 110, 308n41. See also Recapitulation theory

Adolescence, Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (Hall), 28, 288n29

Adults’ aspirations: camp marketing to, 75–77, 301nn74–76, 302n77, 302n83

children’s culture v., 13, 78, 136–43, 161–62

for summer camps, 2, 3, 7, 9–10, 13

Adventures in the Wilderness (Murray), 24, 287n22

African Americans: citizenship claims of, 211–12, 331n72

Great Migration of, 211

interracial camps, 58, 219, 267–70

New York City population ratios of, 211

racialized camp entertainment and, 203–7, 212, 223

summer camp employment of, 192, 213, 213–14, 218–19

White Americans’ ideas about, 193, 197, 212, 225, 326nn12–13, 327n24

African Americans at summer camps, 72–73, 220–22, 301nn62–63

Ku Klux Klan and, 186

local community relations with, 186, 272, 324n81, 325n83, 345n58

Negro Girl Scouts, 72, 221–22

Agrarian ideals, wilderness ideals v., 18, 23, 286n4

“Aids to Scouting” (Baden-Powell), 44

Akeley, Carl, 190, 190, 326n7

Akeley, Mary Jobe. See Jobe, Mary

Allen, Hazel, 247

Amateur Circus Life (Balch, Ernest), 38, 291n71

...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Warm History of Modern Childhood
• I At Work and at Play: The Making of Camp “Family”
• II Modernity and Tradition in Children’s Socialization
• Conclusion: “I Had to Go On in Life”: From Camp to Childhood Nostalgia
• Abbreviations of Archives
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author