For What and For Whom is Camping in America?: A Review of Camping Grounds

Phoebe S. K. Young’s Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement offers a history of the varied, at times conflicting reasons that Americans have set up camp and what their practices reflect about their evolving relationships to the natural world, their society and their government. With sections covering topics from the Grand Army of the Republic and John Muir, tramping and the loop campground, the National Outdoor Leadership School and activism, her work considers the economic, cultural, and political forces that have given rise to many of the major reasons and ways that diverse groups of Americans have pitched tents and set up camp. She challenges practitioners and scholars to consider more how the identities of who is camping and their motivations have mattered a great deal to how their practice has been perceived by the public, the government, and other campers.