‘The Ego Ideal of the Good Camper’ and the Nature of Summer Camp

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century the organized summer camp movement developed as a response to anxieties about the effects of the urban-industrial age on children. Camping advocates wanted to create a countermodern alternative to the world their campers inhabited most of the year. These advocates subscribed to a set of values and assumptions about what is “natural” for children that eventually provoked a debate over the uses of nature in socializing children. Environmental historians can learn much from this debate as they try to make sense of how nature has been constructed both literally and symbolically in the twentieth century.