Revisit Florida at a time when children were much more at home in the wild. The balmy northeast corner of the state, filled with lakes and forests primeval, was a camper's paradise. Iconic summer camps like Blanding, Chowenwaw, Echockotee, Immokalee, Montgomery, Keystone, Seminole and Weed played vital roles in the development of countless children. They swapped adventures beneath the stars, a heartening reminder that even the worst days can make the best stories. Join author Dorothy K. Fletcher and experience the giddy relief of campers who weathered their first dark night and welcomed a brilliant sunrise, just before all the fun begins!

Although summer camps profoundly impact children, they have received little attention from scholars. The well-known Farm & Wilderness (F&W) camps, founded in 1939 by Ken and Susan Webb, resembled most other private camps of the same period in many ways, but F&W also had some distinctive features. Campers and staff took pride in the special ruggedness of the surrounding environment, and delighted in the exceptional rigor of the camping trips and the work projects. Importantly, the Farm & Wilderness camps were some of the first private camps to become racially integrated.The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps: Progressive Ideals in the Twentieth Century traces these camps, both unique and emblematic of American youth culture of the twentieth century, from their establishment in the late 1930s to the end of the twentieth century. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson explore how ideals considered progressive in the 1940s and 1950s had to be reconfigured by the camps to respond to shifts in culture and society as well as to new understandings of race and ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual identity. To illustrate this change, the authors draw on over forty interviews with former campers, archival materials, and their own memories. This book tells a story of progressive ideals, crises of leadership, childhood challenges, and social adaptation in the quintessential American summer camp.

THE SEASIDE SUMMER CAMPS by Gianluca Mancini(English Translation by Vicki F. Weinstein,Ph. D.)In the summer of 1997, in Ravenna, Italy, strange, obscure accidents, presages of death and old guilt feelings torment Manuele, but also Davide and Umberto. What links the three main personages, all 35 years old, an architect, an engineer and a wholesale toy salesman, is the Seaside Summer Camps on the Romagnola Adriatic Riviera: immense, imposing buildings erected in the 1930s in an apparently mad futuristic style to celebrate the social strength and dynamic power of the Fascist Regime and to combat childhood diseases with heliotherapy and thalassotherapy.The plot develops on two convergent planes: one in the present and the other in the 1960s, which is inexorably rejoined to the present. A third time plane buried still deeper in the past, in the Ventennio, the twenty year Fascist period from 1923 to 1943, emerges by surprise...There is an Evil advancing behind the scenes, coming from a tenebrous past...