Heading Out: A History of American Camping

Who are the real campers? Through-hiking backpackers traversing the Appalachian Trail? The family in an SUV making a tour of national parks and sleeping in tents at campgrounds? People committed to the RV lifestyle who move their homes from state to state as season and whim dictate? Terence Young would say: all of the above. Camping is one of the country's most popular pastimes—tens of millions of Americans go camping every year. Whether on foot, on horseback, or in RVs, campers have been enjoying themselves for well more than a century, during which time camping's appeal has shifted and evolved. In Heading Out, Young takes readers into nature and explores with them the history of camping in the United States.Young shows how camping progressed from an impulse among city-dwellers to seek temporary retreat from their exhausting everyday surroundings to a form of recreation so popular that an industry grew up around it to provide an endless supply of ever-lighter and more convenient gear. Young humanizes camping's history by spotlighting key figures in its development and a sampling of the campers and the variety of their excursions. Readers will meet William H. H. Murray, who launched a craze for camping in 1869; Mary Bedell, who car camped around America for 12,000 miles in 1922; William Trent Jr., who struggled to end racial segregation in national park campgrounds before World War II; and Carolyn Patterson, who worked with the U.S. Department of State in the 1960s and 1970s to introduce foreign service personnel to the "real" America through trailer camping. These and many additional characters give readers a reason to don a headlamp, pull up a chair beside the campfire, and discover the invigorating and refreshing history of sleeping under the stars.

Introduction: Roughing It Smoothly1. Adventures in the Wilderness: William H. H. Murray and the Beginning of Recreational Camping2. The Art of Camping: Roughing It during the Decades before Automobiles3. Let's Hit the Motor-Camping Trail: The Automobile Transforms Camping4. The Garage in the Forest: E. P. Meinecke and the Development of the Modern Auto Campground5. Liberalizing the Campground: W. J. Trent Jr. and the Struggle against National Park Segregation6. A Clearer Picture of This Country: Trailer Camping to Discover America7. A Renewal of Our Faith and Ideals: The Development of Backpacking and Long-Distance TrailsEpilogue: The Decline and Promise of American Camping

Terence Young is Professor of Geography at California State Polytechnic University. He is the author of Building San Francisco's Parks, 1850–1930 and coeditor of The Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations.

The great strength of this book is that it distinguishes 'noneconomic social relations, science, and technology, values, attitudes and beliefs' in camping pilgrimages from the scenic, sublime, and transcendental nature that earlier generations sought.... Young writes with an accessible yet confident prose that will engage readers of differing interests. Embedded in each chapter are fascinating revelations... [that] Young has carefully researched and wonderfully written.

While searching for the meaning of camping, Young concludes it is a pilgrimage activity—not religious, but an experience where people leave home, travel somewhere as an act of devotion, and return home changed. This focus led Young to one of the book's key insights: that camping is as much about leaving somewhere as it is about going to another place. This book's vignettes are well researched and provide interesting details that drive the narrative.

Terence Young's new book Heading Out: A History of American Camping, a major contribution to ongoing studies of camping, takes us on a satisfying multi-stop excursion through the question of why—for more than two centuries—North Americans have voluntarily left home to carry packs, pitch tents, and park travel trailers in the name of recreation. Along the way, Young provides deep insights into the diverse modes, meaning, and implications of American camping, with the idea that this practice moves us out of ordinary life—not necessarily into the natural, but away from the urban.

Carefully written and highly readable.

The book is richly illustrated with campground plans and photographs.... Young has made an important contribution to camping history, and Heading Out will encourage land use professionals, environmental historians, and camping enthusiasts to hit the road, trail, and archives for more adventure.

Young offers a fascinating evolution of camping from the 1860s to the present.... Heading Out will engage and delight. Camping enthusiasts, backpackers, nature lovers, and scholars will enjoy and learn from this work. It is a satisfying read.

[Heading out] is deeply researched in archives around the nation and in a truly impressive body of published primary sources including newspapers, magazines, and camping guides. By investigating topics such as how almost all campgrounds came to have nearly the same basic layout or why backpacking trails came to be so popular, Young encourages readers to think about one of their ordinary activities in historical terms and to conceive themselves as actors in one moment of a long-term national drama. In that drama, Americans began to think of living outdoors as fun instead of a hardship, and camping came to take on religious, nationalist, and social well-being implications in U.S. society. Importantly, Young relates all this in a thoroughly engaging narrative. The book is superbly organized and cleverly written in crystal clear prose, making it a fast and easy read.

Heading Out provides a fascinating and engagingly written look at the history of sleeping out-of-doors in the United States.... From scholars to thru-hikers, everyone who has slept outdoors or is interested in Americans' relationship to the natural world will find Young's work an engrossing read and will rethink what it means to sleep outside. For the field of public history, Young's work gives intellectual weight to recreational pursuits and urges scholars to think critically about the long, often political, history of the outdoor activities in which Americans have long participated. For a public audience, Heading Out helps readers interrogate why, how, and with what gear they choose to spend the night out of doors.

A lively, expansive, deeply researched, and rewarding exploration of how and why Americans have gone camping since the Civil War.... Students, scholars, and outdoor enthusiasts will all learn from it and enjoy the ride along the way.

Anyone who has studied the American conservation movement has doubtless come across references to camping.... What are its origins? What accounts for its popularity? How has the practice of camping evolved over time? Thanks to Terence Young, we now have a volume devoted specifically to this uniquely American pastime – one that is as entertaining as it is enlightening.... There is something for everybody in this meticulously researched and fascinating story of American camping.