New York Times bestselling author Iris Krasnow reflects with humor and heart on her summer camp experiences and the lessons she and her fellow campers learned there that have stayed with them throughout their lives. Iris Krasnow was 8 years old when she first attended sleep-away camp, building lasting friendships and essential life skills amid the towering pine trees and open skies of Wisconsin. Decades later, she returned to Camp Agawak as a staff member to help resurrect Agalog, the camp's defunct magazine that she wrote for as a child. There, she revisits the activities she loved as a young girl: singing songs around a campfire, swimming in a pristine lake, sleeping under the stars—experiences that continue to fill her with wisdom and perspective. A nostalgic, inspiring memoir with a universal message on the importance of long-term friendship for campers and non-campers alike, Camp Girls weaves between past and present, filling the page in delicious detail with cabin pranks, canoe trips in rainstorms, and the joy of finding both your independence and your interdependence in nature alongside your peers. Through rich storytelling, Iris shares her own and other campers' adventures and the lessons from childhood that can shape fulfilling and successful adulthoods. Ultimately, Iris powerfully demonstrates that camp is more than a place or a collection of activities: it's where we learn what it means to be human and what it feels like to truly belong to a family—not of blood, but of history, loyalty, and tradition.

For over a century children have spent their summers at "sleepaway" camps in the Adirondacks. These camps inspired vivid memories and created an enduring legacy that has come to be a uniquely American tradition. In A Paradise for Boys and Girls: Children’s Camps in the Adirondacks, a complement to the Adirondack museum exhibit of the same name, the authors explore the history of Adirondack children’s camps, their influence on the lives of the campers, and their impact on the communities in which they exist. Drawing on the rich documentary and pictorial evidence gathered from the histories of 331 camps located in the Adirondacks from 1886 to the present, this collection chronicles the changing attitudes about children and childhood. Historian Leslie Paris details social change in "Pink Music: Continuity and Change at Early Adirondack Summer Camps." In the title essay of the book, Hallie Bond offers a history of Adirondack camping from the establishment of Camp Dudley on Lake Champlain in 1892 to the present. Finally, historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg concludes the collection with "A Wiser and Safer Place: The Meaning of Camping During World War II." Lavishly illustrated with historic photographs, the book includes a directory of Adirondack camps, with brief descriptive notes for each of the camps. The photographs and essays in this volume offer readers a richer understanding of this singular region and its powerful connection to childhood.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Americans began to recognize adolescence as a developmental phase distinct from both childhood and adulthood. This awareness, however, came fraught with anxiety about the debilitating effects of modern life on adolescents of both sexes. For boys, competitive sports as well as "primitive" outdoor activities offered by fledging organizations such as the Boy Scouts would enable them to combat the effeminacy of an overly civilized society. But for girls, the remedy wasn't quite so clear. Surprisingly, the "girl problem"?a crisis caused by the transition from a sheltered, family-centered Victorian childhood to modern adolescence where self-control and a strong democratic spirit were required of reliable citizens?was also solved by way of traditionally masculine, adventurous, outdoor activities, as practiced by the Girl Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, and many other similar organizations. Susan A. Miller explores these girls' organizations that sprung up in the first half of the twentieth century from a socio-historical perspective, showing how the notions of uniform identity, civic duty, "primitive domesticity," and fitness shaped the formation of the modern girl.

An intimate view of frontier women--Anglo and Indian--and the communities they forged.

As the twentieth century dawned, progressive educators established a national organization for adolescent girls to combat what they believed to be a crisis of girls’ education. A corollary to the Boy Scouts of America, founded just a few years earlier, the Camp Fire Girls became America’s first and, for two decades, most popular girls’ organization. Based on Protestant middle-class ideals—a regulatory model that reinforced hygiene, habit formation, hard work, and the idea that women related to the nation through service—the Camp Fire Girls invented new concepts of American girlhood by inviting disabled girls, Black girls, immigrants, and Native Americans to join. Though this often meant a false sense of cultural universality, in the girls’ own hands membership was often profoundly empowering and provided marginalized girls spaces to explore the meaning of their own cultures in relation to changes taking place in twentieth-century America. Through the lens of the Camp Fire Girls, Jennifer Helgren traces the changing meanings of girls’ citizenship in the cultural context of the twentieth century. Drawing on girls’ scrapbooks, photographs, letters, and oral history interviews, in addition to adult voices in organization publications and speeches, The Camp Fire Girls explores critical intersections of gender, race, class, nation, and disability.

This work provides scholars, instructors, and students with influential essays that have defined the field of American girls' history and culture. Covering girlhood and the relationships between girls and women, the volume tackles pivotal themes such as education, work, play, sexuality, consumption, and the body.