In response, private-school operators and entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to expand their businesses and built idyllic retreats that would transport young people away from the perceived dangers and chaos of the city. According to Abigail A. Van Slyck’s book “A Manufactured Wilderness,” summer camps represented a dual fantasy of health and exclusion.
For “middle-class, native-born Americans” in the late 1800s… summer camps were a chance to reclaim a sense of national character and class identity that was being threatened by urbanization and immigration. Sources:
Information obtained from The New Yorker articles.
Reference: See here
The history of summer camps is more or less what you’d expect. They were started in the late nineteenth century as a way for city-bound boys to get some fresh air and relearn masculinity and the virtues of being in nature. Industrialization had pushed many middle-class families into urban areas, where they quickly found themselves surrounded by new immigrants from Europe.
In response, a group of proprietors—largely private-school operators who needed a way to expand their businesses to the summer—began to construct bucolic bubbles that would take young boys (and eventually girls) away from the filth of the city.
In her book “ A Manufactured Wilderness ,” the art historian Abigail A. Van Slyck convincingly lays out the case that summer camp represented a dual fantasy of health and exclusion. Describing the “middle-class, native-born Americans” of the eighteen-nineties, she writes:
