American Summer Camp Research Articles

A toponymy of American summer camps: Onscreen stereotypes or symbols ripe for change?

A toponymy of American summer camps: Onscreen stereotypes or symbols ripe for change?

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Linda Mahood The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (JHCY) explores the development of childhood and youth cultures and the experiences of young people across diverse times and places. We are keen to publish original articles that embrace novel historical methodologies as well as interdisciplinary scholarship that shares a historical focus on children and young people. Many issues also include an "object lesson" on the material culture of childhood, contemporary policy pieces, and reviews of books. This issue begins with Shurlee Swain's "An Imperial Mission? The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the International Dissemination of Ideas around Child Protection prior to World War I." Swain traces the transmission of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), dissemination of their ideas throughout the colonies, and the factors that led to the success, failure, or local adaptation of the NSPCC's child-saving mission. She shows that within ten years of its foundation, the NSPCC was reporting on kindred societies in India, South Africa, New Zealand, and several of the Australian colonies, although none was able to completely replicate the original model. The next three articles deal with political and missionary movements. In her article, "Better Off with 'Their Own People': Basque Refugee Children, Catholic Anti-Communism, and the Geopolitics of Compassion in FDR's America," Anita Casavantes Bradford details how, in 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, the autonomous Basque government organized the evacuation of 25,000 endangered Basque children. At the same time, American anti-fascists launched a program to bring Basque refugee children to the United States. Opposed by a restrictionist State Department and powerful anti-communist Catholic leaders, they were ultimately unsuccessful. Bradford argues that close examination of the failed program reveals how foreign policy and domestic political interests have long interacted with changing notions of race and religion to determine which unaccompanied children were seen as deserving of asylum in the United States. Divya Kannan's article focuses on children in India and [End Page 185] how missionary literature for young British readers drew upon a hierarchy of colonial childhoods premised on racial differentiation. In "'Children's Work for Children': Caste, Childhood, and Missionary Philanthropy in Colonial India," Kannan states that in the colonial field, such literature colluded with existent dominant caste biases, perpetuated through violent means. Kannan shows how Othering of low-caste children destabilized missionary notions of sentimentalized childhood even as periodical literature represented them as objects of pity. These children were not "voiceless victims," but their lived realities impinged on missionary practices and literary representations. In "Celebrating Violence? Children, Youth, and War Education in Maoist China (1949–1976)," Orna Naftali looks at the role of children's education in the creation of Chinese war culture in the Mao era (1949–1976). Analyzing school textbooks as well as pedagogical and media publications, Naftali highlights the existence of competing visions of children's roles in military violence. The findings challenge the thesis that childhood in Maoist China was ultra-militarized and the assumption that during the Cold War era, countries on different sides of the divide held starkly contrasting notions of the young. The final two articles deal with children's relationship to the natural world. Chris Rasmussen looks at the Children's International Summer Villages (CISV). His article, "A Whole Network of Friends: Doris Twitchell Allen's Children's International Summer Villages and American Peacemaking in the Cold War," examines a post–World War II effort to harness applied psychological expertise for the cause of world peace. Psychologist Doris Twitchell Allen believed that the American summer camp had the potential to break down national barriers and unite eleven-year-olds in "friendships without frontiers." The ambitious vision to engineer a lasting peace was characteristic of postwar psychology, and the history of the early CISV demonstrates how the Cold War made it an impossible goal. Finally, Joe Goddard examines three mid-twentieth-century Walt Disney short cartoons. His article, entitled "Celluloid Cityscapes: Kids, Cars, and Cartoons in the United States, 1938–1965," argues that initially, Disney cartoons were aimed at a mixed adult and child audience, but over...

Wilderness Laboratories: Rhetorical Acts of Surveillance at American Summer Camps

Usually you are called to come to infirmary when you are least expecting to, you don't have time even to take a bath. Being a new girl of course you don't know what to expect because no two examinations are alike.First you are shown into a where you are instructed to take off all your clothes. Of course everyone tries to leave on some of their underclothes but eventually you get all of your own clothes off and put on one of those so-called angel robes....Next you are shown into a room, which by way has all windows open, through which a cool breeze is blowing. There you are confronted by M. T.,1 and I'll tell you right now you would never think by looking at her that she had such fingers. She pokes you all over, then tries her best to you but takes pity and doesn't deliver blow that would really do it.The little room described above suggests a child's fear of physician's office as girl notes lack of privacy and respect that accompany a systematic poking and prodding of her body. The feelings of claustrophobia and surveillance seem to intensify as hard fingers try to knock over patient during inspection. The cool breeze coming in windows is only sign that this doctor's visit occurs anywhere near nature. may be surprising is this letter's provenance. It was written by a child attending a summer camp in 1920s.The description in letter bridges two different epistemologies of body: one located in what appears to be a carefree wilderness, and other connected closely to urban doctor's office, where one might imagine microscopes and lab equipment surrounding patient. Within description, fingers of scientist seem to reach uncomfortably into wilderness in a manner that counters typical camp images of roasting marshmallows a fire and living in rustic cabins. In Nature: The Rise of American Summer Camp, Leslie Paris explains, Children's inculcation into camps' body-focused culture began when they underwent precamp physicals. These exams were designed primarily to keep ill and potentially contagious children out of camps, where they might put others at risk (123). Some may agree that Paris was right when she stated that at summer camp the new interwar social science rhetoric never completely overrode a more sentimental wilderness narrative (Children's Nature 240); however, private summer camps reflect urban society's preoccupation with body surveillance much more than they purport to separate from it, and this is illustrated by focusing on child's body across and within iconic settings at summer camps in early years of their development. A rhetorical study of early camp documents and traditions reveals that wilderness, under a scientific gaze, became a laboratory featuring human sub- jects whose growth depended on intervention of health experts to make them superior in body and mind.Exploring rhetoric, particularly rhetoric associated with body, means embracing what Debra Hawhee explains as transdisciplinarity. In her work on Kenneth Burke and body, Hawhee says, What distinguishes transdisciplinarity from interdisciplinarity is its effort to suspend-however temporary-one's own disciplinary terms and values in favor of a broad, open, multilevel inquiry (3). This study of how American summer camp became a laboratory more than a pastoral setting, draws from disparate sources of information: reports of education in schools and cities to contrast those about camp settings, recent scholarship in disability and medical rhetoric, studies in eugenics rhetoric, and assistance from those who theorize relationships between body and environment. Jay Dolmage is correct when he says that rhetoric may be viewed as the strategic study of circulation of power through communication (3). To discuss responsibly how such power circulates, it is important to look across disciplines to theorize how body becomes a site of power negotiation. …

“Moon Lake” and the American Summer Camp Movement

“Moon Lake” and the American Summer Camp Movement Sarah L. Peters From the beginning his martyred presence seriously affected them. They had a disquieting familiarity with it, hearing the spit of his despising that went into his bugle. At times they could hardly recognize what he thought he was playing. Loch Morrison, Boy Scout and Life Saver, was under the ordeal of a week’s camp at Moon Lake with girls. —“Moon Lake” 412 In the first lines of “Moon Lake,” Welty comically introduces us to the tension between the adolescent Boy Scout and the girls he is charged with protecting during their daily dips. Loch’s resentment extends to the female counselors as well as to his own mother, who has “roped” him into this tedious obligation. He avoids them as much as possible, setting his tent apart from the group and eating “all alone like a dog” (412, 413). The woods are ruined by the female presence, and he will only use the lake when it is free of girls and their “despised … predicaments” (specifically, their inability to swim) (412). While his attitude may be typical of young adolescent behavior, his disdain also mirrors the conflict between the Boy Scouts of America—of which Loch is “the most conceited” member if we are to believe Jinny Love Stark—and the girls’ organizations that sprang up in response to the Scouting movement (450). These youth organizations and the summer camps they developed and promoted were in full swing by the 1920s when “Moon Lake” is set and were well established in popular culture by the 1940s when Welty wrote the story. Welty’s choice to label Loch a Boy Scout draws on the visible and well-known Scouting movement as well as the investment of both feminine and masculine characteristics into the idealized American landscape. Outdoor youth programs forwarded the agendas of adults who wished to direct adolescent boys and girls toward particular and separate roles, but while many of these programs sought to clarify gender identities, the liminal landscape of the camp—which mirrors in Welty’s story the transitional life stage of adolescence—allowed for a more fluid sense of self and of relationships with others and with nature. Setting her story of sexual development in a summer camp allows her girl [End Page 55] characters to linger in the wonder of the in-between, where they project meaning on to the woods, the lake, and the night, before returning to meet the expectations of their parents and their community. The international Scouting movement began amid fears that the forces of modernity had brought about a crisis of masculinity; boys were over-civilized and weakened by technological advances that distanced them from the natural world and their primitive drives. The remedy proposed by many, including President Theodore Roosevelt, was time spent in strenuous physical activity and “outdoor life” (Miller 3). In the United States, this pursuit of lost masculinity was coupled with nostalgia for the frontier and romanticized notions of indigenous cultures. In her analysis of phallic imagery in Welty’s story, Patricia Yaeger notes that the masculine landscape of Moon Lake is “an odd reversal of the traditional association of pastoral nature and femininity,” but this masculine characterization of the camp is right in line with the ideology of the Scouting movement which presented the wilderness as a proving ground for young men, a contrast to the feminized luxuries of home (434). In this rugged setting, boys developed into robust, self-reliant young men who, many hoped, might exert an influence on their homes and communities, restoring manhood to an effete society. Their khaki military-style uniforms went far to increase their visibility and their numbers as the first World War brought with it a surge in patriotic ideals and community engagement. This rehearsal for manhood appears in Welty’s story as Loch’s exaggerated performance of masculinity—“stood skinny against the clouds as on a stage,” he prepares to dive from points too high and at “hours too hot for girls” (412). “Reveille [is] his” as he imposes order on the camp through his military bugle calls (413). He strikes vaunting poses between firing imaginary...

Putting the “Fun” in Fundamentalism: Religious Nationalism and the Split Self at Hindutva Summer Camps in the United States

AbstractSome Hindu immigrants to America – those who subscribe to Hindutva values – desire full rights and recognition in their adopted homeland even as they simultaneously demand that so‐called “migrants” to India (that is, Muslims and Christians whose communities have flourished in India for hundreds of years) acquiesce to their vision of India as a “Hindu state.” In an American racial landscape that structurally privileges whites, I argue that the cultural categorization of Hindu immigrants into a “lesser‐than‐whites” minority has only served to fuel the growth of Hindu supremacist groups in the United States. In this article, I draw on fieldwork with two Hindu American summer camps in order to show that some Hindu immigrants misrecognize and repress their own current alienation in a manner that has subsequently aggravated latent antipathies towards Muslim and Christian communities in India. [religion, alienation, ethnicity, Hinduism, diaspora, nationalism]

'God First, You Second, Me Third": An Exploration of 'Quiet Jewishness" at Camp Wah-Kon-Dah

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] My first experience at a southern Jewish summer camp was not easy. I felt out of place. I couldn't speak Hebrew. I didn't know the songs, nor could I join in the raucous chanting of the Birkat Hamazon, the traditional Jewish blessing after meals. I was homesick. I didn't want to spend the night at camp. I hated corndogs. And to make matters worse, I was in my mid-thirties, and it was hot as blazes in south central Mississippi. As the Project Director of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, located at Camp Henry S. Jacobs in Utica, Mississippi, in the early 1990s, I wondered what sane person attends summer camp in Mississippi, let alone Jewish summer camp? My own childhood camping experience began in the late 1960s at Camp Wah-Kon-Dah in Rocky Mount, Missouri, on the Lake of the Ozarks--a camp for Jewish youth, but not a Jewish Camp. Camp Wah-Kon-Dah was quietly Jewish. Since many of the campers came from small southern towns with tiny Jewish populations, it was a new and exciting experience to be among other Jews. But imagine a ask, don't tell policy regarding our Jewish identity--two hundred Jewish kids boating, swimming, and shooting archery, but nobody talked about our Jewishness. It could have been a covert operation with the Jewishness so quiet. We knew we were Jewish, enough said. To an unsuspecting visitor, Wah-Kon-Dah looked and sounded like any other American summer camp--except for all the Jewish campers. And that was exactly what Ben Kessler, the founder of Wah-Kon-Dah, wanted when he opened a private Jewish summer camp for boys in 1939. A Jewish native of St. Louis, Ben Kessler began Camp Wah-Kon-Dah in an era of wartime fear and disruption. This was an anxious time for American Jews, stung by the anti-Semitic quotas and discrimination of the interwar years and the growing horror regarding the fate of European Jewry as the Holocaust came to light in the 1940s. Kessler hoped to give his campers a summer filled with joy, the opportunity to build strong physiques, improve personal character, learn skills, and, lastly, to a democracy as a camp community. (1) Wah-Kon-Dah was part of a summer camp craze in America that was shaped by the cult of the strenuous life (an anti-modernist ideology that sought to repair and strengthen American society through contact with the great outdoors), social reform movements of the Progressive Era, and back-to-nature work projects of the New Deal. Historian Gary Zola describes Jewish camping as a genuine hybrid of organized camping in America. The first Jewish summer camps were established in the early 1900s to serve both as a pastoral refuge for needy Jewish children in the urban Northeast and as sites of Americanization for children of recent Jewish immigrants. During the 1930s, Jewish summer camps and retreat centers with political agendas sponsored by communist, socialist, Zionist, and Yiddish organizations grew in popularity. The majority of these institutions were located near the large Jewish population centers along the East Coast. A smaller, but important, number of Jewish boarding houses, camps, and kosher inns were located in the southern mountains, including Wildacres, the summer location of the North Carolina B'nai B'rith Institute. (2) Non-denominational, private Jewish camps grew during the prosperous years after World War II and today dominate Jewish camping, including the ten Jewish summer camps located in the American South. For the mid-South, Camp Wah-Kon-Dah in Rocky Mount, Missouri, represented a different model of private Jewish camping guided by religious pluralism rather than a specific political or denominational expression of Judaism. At Wah-Kon-Dah, the owner and campers were Jewish, but there was little or no explicit Jewish programming or education. Jonathan Sarna connects this model to an earlier era of Jewish camping, in which Jews emphasized American values and Judaism was reduced to a whisper. …

A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890 – 1960

232 Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 20 No. 2 (Fall 2010) ISSN: 1546-2250 A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890 — 1960 Van Slyck, Abigail (2006). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 296 pages. $27.50. ISBN 9780816648771. A Manufactured Wilderness is an engaging and nostalgic examination of a largely unexplored element of architectural history, the North American summer camp. Through a rich investigation of camp mess halls, sleeping units and program areas, Abigail Van Slyck investigates the major trends of camp development and their impact on the construction of childhood from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. In particular, Van Slyck addresses American society’s changing attitudes toward children’s health, sanitation, play, gender relationships, and Native American culture, and investigates the role summer camps played in addressing social anxieties of the time: gender roles, class tension, race relations and particularly modern society’s impact on the lives of their children. In Van Slyck’s words, this volume differs from conventional works in the field of architectural history in two significant ways. First, it focuses on the cultural landscape, defined as the intersection of the built environment and social life with the natural landscape. Second, it “defines architecture as a process in which institutional priorities are translated into material form” (p. xxxi) by shifting the focus not onto the architects themselves, but onto the decision makers who hired the architects. Van Slyck investigates a range of camp operations, including private camps, religiously affiliated social service camps, and those sponsored by youth organizations in the Southeastern, Midwestern, and Northeastern U.S. and neighboring Canada. This volume is organized into six chapters, each examining a primary area of summer camp life—camp layout, program activities, housing and sleeping areas, cooking, eating and mealtime sites, 233 camp sanitation and hygiene, and the use of Native American motifs in the camp landscape—and how these reflected the changing views of middle- and upper-class childhood in North America. In Chapter 1, Van Slyck describes in great detail the changes in the physical layout and design of camps as they reflected the changing priorities of early 20th-century North America and also considers the “cultural meaning of the camp landscape in two realms” (p. 2). First, she examines the role of camps in the transformation of the North American rural landscape. Second, she investigates theories of camp planning and their impact on the camp sites themselves, with special attention given to the “metaphors embedded in the camp landscape” (p. 3). Van Slyck describes how camp directors restructured their camps’ layouts to reflect changing priorities and concerns of the day, noting the transition of camp layouts from ad hoc arrangements in the late 1800s, to strict, straight militaristic lines in the 1900s, to a trend toward more naturalistic design in the 1920s. The second chapter focuses on camp activities and programs. It offers an interesting description of the challenges faced by camp directors to make available recreational experiences that not only provided an outdoor experience (as part of the back-to-nature trend of the late 1800s) but also addressed the gender, race and social anxieties of the time. In the third chapter, on camp housing and sleeping, Van Slyck notes that camp directors maintained a keen interest in campers’ health, and sought to provide healthy living and sleeping conditions. This chapter traces the changing form of sleeping areas as they transitioned from the attic floors of Fresh Air Camps to canvas tents and wooden platforms to cabins and bunkhouses. Chapter 4 investigates the development of camps’ cooking and eating sites. Utilizing Elizabeth Cromley’s idea of the food axis, Van Slyck discusses the varied stages and locations for meal preparation, eating and clean up, noting how the architectural design of mess halls and dining lodges changed over time to both maximize the efficiency of the kitchen, and to minimize campers’ awareness of the adult activities associated with meal preparation. 234 This chapter provides several photo images and floor plan drawings to illustrate the changing architectural design of these facilities. Sanitation was of great concern from the earliest years of organized camping. Compared to schools, camps had the...

Children's nature: the rise of the American summer camp

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Warm History of Modern Childhood At Work and at Play: The Making of Camp Family1 Small Islands: The First Summer Camps 2 A Home Though Away from Home: How Parents, Camp Owners, and Children Forged Camp Networks 3 Rituals of the Season: The Organization of Camp Community 4 Between Generations: Tensions in the Camp FamilyII Modernity and Tradition in Children's Socialization5 Is It Progress? Modernity and Authenticity in Camp Life 6 Tans, Tepees, and Minstrel Shows: Race, Primitivism, and Camp Community 7 The Pioneer Ideal: Camp History, American History, Children's History Conclusion: I Had to Go On in Life: From Camp to Childhood Nostalgia Abbreviations of Archives Notes Index About the Author

Designing modern childhoods: history, space, and the material culture of children

At once cautionary and hopeful, Designing Modern Childhoods is an indispensable and incisive analysis of the special role of the built environment in both opening and foreclosing good futures for kids around the globe. -Michael Sorkin, director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York From Turkish schools to New Zealand playgrounds and American summer camps, these essays offer a fresh and challenging take on the modern city from the perspective of its most overlooked residents. -Dell Upton, professor of art history, University of California, Los Angeles This book takes the reader on a richly detailed and imaginative journey into the changing organization and meanings of childhood. -Barrie Thorne, professor of sociology, gender, and women's studies, University of California, Berkeley This imaginative and original collection will play an important role in enhancing a growing interest in the history and sociology of childhood. -Peter Stearns, provost and professor of history, George Mason University In Designing Modern Childhoods, architectural historians, social historians, social scientists, and architects examine the history and design of places and objects such as schools, hospitals, playgrounds, houses, cell phones, snowboards, and even the McDonald's Happy Meal. Special attention is given to how children use and interpret the spaces, buildings, and objects that are part of their lives, becoming themselves creators and carriers of culture. The authors extract common threads in children's understandings of their material worlds, but they also show how the experience of modernity varies for young people across time, through space, and according to age, gender, social class, race, and culture. The foreword by Paula S. Fass and epilogue by John R. Gillis add additional depth to this comprehensive examination. Marta Gutman is an associate professor in the School of Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture at the City College of New York/CUNY. Ning de Coninck-Smith is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Sociology at the School of Education-Arhus University.

Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp. By Leslie Paris. New York: New York University Press, 2008. 368 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. Cloth $39.00

<i>Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp</i>. By Leslie Paris. New York: New York University Press, 2008. 368 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. Cloth $39.00

:Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp

:Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp

Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp (review)

Leslie Paris, Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp. New York: New York University Press, 2008. 363 pp. Ah, the thrills and trials of summer camp-learning to swim in the lake; joshing in the cabin; singing goofy songs around a campfire; playing baseball on dusty fields; shivering in leaky tents on rainy overnights; learning ersatz Indian lore. The history of these memories and many more are analyzed with style and originality in Leslie Paris's readable book. More than sophisticated nostalgia, Children's Nature is a book about culture, both from an adult and a children's perspective. Covering the period from the origin of summer camps in the late nineteenth century through the important developments between the two world wars, Paris reveals much about how Americans perceived childhood, leisure, and education as society moved toward a post-industrial age. Paris does not, and could not be expected to, cover every subtopic; in focusing primarily on mainstream camps, she excludes, for example, Bible camps, day camps, and family-oriented summer gatherings, and she focuses primarily on the Northeast, where camping was most extensive. But these limitations are not serious. Using an impressive array of camp records, memoirs, social scientific literature, and, most entertainingly, children's letters and diaries, Paris brings alive the experiences and motivations of the camp directors, parents, and campers. Children's summer camps originated and have been most successful in the United States. By the interwar years, as many as fifteen percent of American children attended these camps each summer. From their earliest days in the 1880s to the present, these camps have served as an important tool of and, according to Paris, a particularly American solution to the question of children's socialization, (11) especially among the white middle and elite class families of the urban and suburban Northeast. Working-class children had some access to camps with aid from charitable and liberal political and labor organizations, as did racial minorities somewhat later; but with few exceptions, summer camps remained class and racially segregated for the period that Paris examined. For the most part, the focus is on children between ages eight and fourteen. As they came to contemplate a new, separate, and cherished place of children in American society, camp directors adopted several goals for their operations, all of which were endorsed by the parents who paid for the endeavors. These goals revealed much about American culture and its ironies. Fearing the loss of what they believed had been a simpler, more bucolic way of life as industrialization accelerated, adults such as Ernest Berkeley Balch, founder of Camp Chocorua In New Hampshire, and child psychology pioneer G. Stanley Hall believed that children needed to be protected from fastpaced and threatening adult society, as well as enriched in a separate but adult-organized youth culture. The best way to achieve such ends was to remove kids from the city and give them an opportunity to grow physically and emotionally in a setting close to nature. Middle- and upper-class parents bought into this movement, not only because they shared these feelings but also because they desired some kind of enriching activity to fill the long school vacation period and, in some cases, to provide themselves with extended relief from the supervision of active, sometimes mischievous, offspring. Though Paris's concept of children's nature has provocative, varying meanings, she also sheds light on the ironies of adult nature. …

Kitchen technologies and mealtime rituals: interpreting the food axis at American summer camps, 1890-1950.

Les camps d'ete peuvent sembler l'endroit le moins propice a l'etude des relations entre technologie et culture. Pourtant, l'A. nous presente une etude qui permet de comptendre la relation entre le developpement des technologies culinaires et les changements dans la representation sociale de l'enfance entre la seconde moitie du 19eme et la premiere moitie du 20eme siecles aux Etats Unis. Les organisateurs des camps utilisaient les technologies culinaires disponibles de facon selective, l'experience du camp devant forger avant tout par un travail dur le caractere et le sens de l'autonomie et de responsabilite des generations futures. Neanmoins, a partir de la deuxieme moitie du 20eme siecle, les cusines du camp entretenaient la socialisation des campeurs sans continuer a jouer un role direct dans ce processus

An “Outsider's” Perspective on American Summer Camps

An “Outsider's” Perspective on American Summer Camps