Sharon Wall
The Nature of Nurture

Thousands of children attended or worked at Ontario summer camps in the twentieth century. Did parents simply want a break, or were broader developments at play? The Nurture of Nature explores the history of an institution that shaped the lives of many and brings to light overlooked connections between the history of childhood, the natural environment, class cultures, and modern recreation and leisure.

Two competing cultural tendencies -- antimodern nostalgia and modern enthusiasms about the landscape, child rearing, and identity -- shaped the summer camp. Sharon Wall examines how this tension played out in the camp's interaction with the natural landscape, its class and gendered dimensions, its engagement with emerging ideologies of childhood, and in the politics of race and identity inherent in its "Indian" programming. By tracing the development of summer camps in Ontario, Wall brings new insights to a broader phenomenon: the divided consciousness that has informed modern assumptions about nature, technology, and identity.

A nuanced discussion of the summer camp's contribution to modern social life in North America, The Nurture of Nature is an essential resource for students and practitioners of history, sociology, and cultural studies as well as for anyone who has ever been packed off to camp and wants to explore why.

Mona Gleason, Tamara Myers, Veronica Strong-Boag, Leslie Paris
Lost Kids: Vulnerable Children and Youth in Twentieth-Century Canada and the United States

Children and youth occupy important social and political roles, even as they sleep in their cribs or hang out on street corners. Conceptualized as either harbingers or saboteurs of a bright, secure tomorrow, young people have motivated many adult-driven plans to improve their communities' future. But have all children benefited from these programs and initiatives?

Lost Kids brings together a distinguished group of scholars who explore the under-representation, demonization, and inadequate care of vulnerable children. Drawing on feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial theories, they address three determining factors: the role of the state, the shifting context of the family, and the evolution of child protection and juvenile justice. From examinations of interracial adoption and the treatment of children with disabilities to the deregulation of child labour laws and the social construction of the "hopeless child," this multifaceted collection illuminates the diversity of disadvantaged childhoods and rejects the essentialism of the so-called priceless child or hopeless youth.

Lost Kids provides the social context and historical background necessary to understand the experiences of vulnerable children who frequent the news. It will be of interest to students and scholars of children and youth studies and practitioners and policy-makers in the fields of health, social welfare, and law.

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

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.