Working At Play
A History of Vacations in the United States
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
In Working at Play, Cindy Aron offers the first full length history of how Americans have vacationed--from eighteenth-century planters who summered in Newport to twentieth-century urban workers who headed for camps in the hills. In the early nineteenth century, vacations were taken for health more than for fun, as the wealthy traveled to watering places, seeking cures for everything from consumption to rheumatism. But starting in the 1850s, the growth of a white- collar middle class and the expansion of railroads made vacationing a mainstream activity. Aron charts this growth with grace and insight, tracing the rise of new vacation spots as the nation and the middle class blossomed. She shows how late nineteenth-century resorts became centers of competitive sports--bowling, tennis, golf, hiking, swimming, and boating absorbed the hours. But as vacationing grew, she writes, fears of the dangers of idleness grew with it. Religious camp grounds, where gambling, drinking, and bathing on Sundays were prohibited, became established resorts. At the same time 'self improvement' vacations began to flourish, allowing a middle class still uncomfortable with the notion of leisure to feel productive while at play. With vivid detail and much insight, Working at Play offers a lively history of the vacation, throwing new light on the place of work and rest in American culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The idea of leisure has historically represented dangerous idleness and even sin to many Americans influenced by the legacy of Puritanism. Aron, an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, has entertainingly charted the rise of the cultural tensions between work and play from the early 19th century, when only a "small elite" were able to take a sojourn from their daily routine, into the 1940s, when vacationing had become a mass phenomenon. Drawing on diaries and journals as well as social histories, popular magazines, economic analysis and advertising, Aron shows how 19th-century middle-class vacationers frequently justified their time away from their jobs by structuring their trips around the pursuit of health, religious experiences or educational self-improvement. On the other hand, factory owners and conservative social critics could justify vacations for the working class only by viewing them as a way to increase productivity. Aron is mindful of how issues such as race, religion and union organizing shaped the possibilities and types of recreation available to a wide range of Americans. She makes fascinating observations about such topics as sports and physical exercise for women, how concepts of public modesty changed with the "bathing costume" and the role social reformers and charitable groups played in both expanding and limiting the vacation possibilities for immigrants and the inner-city poor. Accessible and enlightening, Aron's social history deserves a popular and wide readership.
