Camping Grounds

Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement

By: Phoebe S.K. Young

Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley

Camping appears to be a simple proposition, a time-honored way of getting away from it all. This book reveals that, for all its appeal, the simplicity of camping is deceptive, its history and meanings far from obvious.

Why do some Americans find pleasure in sleeping outside, particularly when so many others, past and present, have had to do so for reasons other than recreation? Never only a vacation choice, camping has been something people do out of dire necessity and as a tactic of political protest. Yet the dominant interpretation of camping as a modern recreational ideal has obscured the connections to these other roles.

Camping Grounds rediscovers unexpected and interwoven histories of sleeping outside. It uses extensive research to trace surprising links between veterans, tramps, John Muir, African American freedpeople, Indian communities, and early leisure campers in the nineteenth century; tin-can tourists, federal campground designers, Depression-era transients, family campers, backpacking enthusiasts, and political activists in the twentieth century; and the crisis of the unsheltered and the tent-based Occupy Movement in the twenty-first. These entwined stories show how Americans camp to claim a place in the American republic and why the outdoors is critical to how we relate to nature, the nation, and each other.

©2021 Oxford University Press (P)2022 Tantor

Wrong narrator for this title

I can’t get past the sing-songy lilt of the narrator, and the story isn’t compelling enough to keep me interested. It is VERY repetitive - relating what appears to be stories from one or two authors at a time and making sweeping conclusions based on them. I was hoping for a broader view with more evidence, and a narrator who didn’t try to read this nonfiction like melodrama with multiple voices.
Did not finish. Waste of a credit!