American Camping Culture

American Camping Culture is a special sort of culture which ever emerges across the world. In 1861, an US citizen named Frederick Gunn founded a camp at his boy’s school ground at Connecticut in United States of America. Children and adolescents who attend camp are known as campers. This is not to be confused with summer school, which is usually a required academic curriculum for a student to make up work not accomplished during the academic year, whereas summer camps can include academic work, but is not a requirement for graduation.
Over 200 years, the camping culture has been flourishing in USA and over several times, it has been changed its roots to the highest order. In primitive ages, camping culture was nurturing in summer seasons.

Its spreading goes on

In 2006, the American Camp Association reported that 75 percent of camps added new programs. This is largely to counter a trend in decreasing enrollment in summer camps, which some argue to have been brought about by smaller family sizes and the growth in supplemental educational programs.
There are also religiously affiliated summer camps, such as those run by Christian groups and various denominations of Judaism. Today, the Camp Culture has spread across the all countries. People especially the young people take it hilariously for fitting them smarter, healthier and productive to the nation.
Once American popular culture publications celebrated recreational vehicle travel, and recreational vehicle manufacturing matured into a dynamic, billion-dollar industry that gradually changed into camp culture. It generated camp life to the Americans. In the age of 1890-1960, the culture actually flourished in and outside, especially the surroundings of United Sates. It revealed the relationship between technology and its social and cultural context by experimenting the ways in which changing ideas and attitudes about camp vehicles and leisure camping shaped recreational vehicle technology. After gradual change and reform, recreational camping turned into recreational vehicle technology.

It makes the Americans more active

This study recounts the roots of recreational camping and America's relation to the pastoral landscape to show that as "the art of camping" became more popular, and accessible, equipment manufacturers and suppliers worked to advance new ideas in camping goods. Accompanying the dramatic growth in auto camping, manufacturers and suppliers expanded to meet the needs of a growing commercial market. The role of select engineers and modern designers in establishing the trailer coach industry and advancing new ideas are discussed as well as the role of aircraft technology, aeronautical engineering, and technological transfer. Americans used a variety of recreational vehicles and camping equipment to fulfill their auto camping needs. New designs and materials, sometimes borrowed from railroad, automobile, and aircraft manufacturing, reflected the desires of users and the efforts of businesses in meeting those changing needs.
It gradually includes more items

What began with a few manufacturers supplying tents and camp paraphernalia, within fifty years developed into a dynamic industry producing an array of products for a diverse American market including tent-trailers, auto-conversions, trailer coaches, fifth-wheel trailers, truck campers, and motor homes? This study documents those changes.

A pioneer Ernest Balch or Frederick Gunn would have approved of Bill Murray's counseling methods as Tripper Harrison, Camp North Star's head counselor in Meatballs. But today, the typical American consumer is much more likely to see a summer camp depicted as crazy or scary than as a positive place for personal growth and character development. How did this happen? As the American Camp Association celebrates its centennial and camp celebrates 150 years, it's a great time to reflect, with a grain of salt, on how perceptions of our industry have changed since the nineteenth century.
Prior to World War I, most popular culture discussions of summer camp were in either magazine for adults or books aimed at teenagers. One of earliest was Alfred Balch's 1893 recollection in McClure's Magazine of his brother Ernest's pioneering camp, which operated from 1881–1889 in New Hampshire.
The story of Camp Chicora, of the healthy, open-air life, of the high standards so rigidly lived up to, of the fun they had, of the work they did, and of the lessons in manliness they so unconsciously learned, is really written in the memories of the boys who, during those nine summers, spent their time on that little island.
Optimistic view of the camping movement

This confident and optimistic view of the camping movement was echoed again and again at the turn of the twentieth century with enthusiastic descriptions of tan campers throwing off the evils of city life. Carlyle Ellis, writing in Everybody's Magazine in 1913 is not shy in summing up his view of the camp experience, calling it ’the nearest thing to a perfect system of education in existence,’ and noting that the ‘chief work of the summer camp is to save children from their parents.’ In the monthly magazine The World's Work, educator and camp director Dr. Winthrop Tisdale Talbot (1905) passionately promotes the effect of camp on boys, writing, ‘In camp, poor and rich lads stripped to their swimming trunks are on an absolute equality; the best man wins. Courage, generosity, goodwill, honesty are the touchstones of success in camp.
It boosted Scouting

The most common fictional accounts of camp were in book series aimed at teen girls and boys. For girls, numerous accounts of the Camp Fire Girls were published in novels after 1912. Many of the books described girls' experiences at summer camp. The founders of Camp Fire Girls of America (now Campfire USA), Luther and Charlotte Gluck, were from a family that founded several camps that exist to this day. Boys had pulp novels such as the High School Boys in Summer Camp, featuring athlete and hero Dick Prescott. While Dick and his pals don't go to an organized camp, their adventures camping and saving their town from small-time thugs were likely enough to encourage teen boys to try a residential camp. And it must have helped young master Prescott, because in later novels he goes on to West Point, fights on the Western Front, and then saves America when the Germans invade the East Coast.
In 1918, the Girl Scouts created what might be one of the earliest surviving film depictions of summer camp. The Story of a Girl Scout, the silent film follows a girl to a camp with her troop. Exciting moments include watching the girls tie knots, wash-up in the morning, and learn semaphore in long skirts. It's a far cry from today's slick DVD promotions for sure, but the film depicts the young Girl Scout organization as a positive and organized option for girls of the day.
How it became a popular culture

A revolution in how camps are portrayed in popular culture began in 1961. In that year, we see two very different depictions of summer camp. First, there was the classic Disney movie The Parent Trap, starring Hayley Mills as twin sisters separated as babies and reunited by accident at summer camp. The film is an adoption of a 1949 German novel, Das doppelte Lottchen, or The Double Lottie, which has been made into films in the UK, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Iran, and India (five times), along with several American versions. In The Parent Trap, we still see a respectful depiction of a summer camp. Sure, the camp leadership is a bit comical, but the camp runs well and the campers are disciplined and expected to follow rules.

But in the same year as the sugary Parent Trap came publication of William Butler's novel The Butterfly Revolution (1961). Echoing Lord of the Flies, campers at a boys' camp take over their camp and the nearby girls' camp and impose a totalitarian regime. Rebellion by campers would become a recurring theme in movies from this point on. In one of the last pages of the novel, Winston, the boy that tells the story through diary entries, states: I know one thing, though. I will never go to summer camp again. Never! This negative view of camp is a complete reversal from the prevailing theme of nearly all popular depictions that came before it and can be considered the first of two important events that changed the role of camps in popular culture.
What a novelty

The second came in 1963 with the release of the third album by former game-show producer Allan Sherman. My Son, the Nut contained the song Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, a novelty song about a boy at a horrible summer camp. The song reached number two on the Billboard charts for three weeks in the summer of 1963. Despite an upbeat ending, never again would the public see camp as the utopia it was often portrayed as in the first half of the century. A second version with different lyrics was performed by Sherman in 1964 on The Tonight Show, and then a board game called Camp Granada was released by Milton Bradley in 1965. In the game, players had to drive a broken-down bus in an attempt to be the first to escape a rotten summer camp. Not exactly LIFE Magazine.

Adaption to the camp way typically goes well; camp professionals are adept at orchestrating it. But that may not be the case in the health center, an area of camp where culture-bound beliefs can be extremely impactful. Indeed, culture bound beliefs color all aspects of camp, but the focus here is on those associated with health services.
What do you routinely do to keep yourself healthy? For example, how often do you bathe/shower? What do you eat, how much, and when? Do you avoid drafts? Do you strike a balance between exercise and rest?
When you get sick, what do you eat and drink?

When you get sick, what do you eat and drink? At what point are you “too sick” to go to work/school? Who makes that decision? How do you express pain — by crying, moaning, quiet withdrawal? Do kids express pain differently than adults? Does your gender or sex make a difference to these things?
These are examples of how acculturation influences health and the expression of it. Our campers and staff typically learn these expressions in their home environments, most often under the tutelage of that esteemed sage called ‘Mom’. Their health practice- as and beliefs come to camp with them. 

When feeling good and in the perceived ‘safe space’ of camp

 When feeling good and in the perceived ‘safe space’ of camp, it is easy to enjoy. But all it takes is for someone to get ill or injured and the personal health beliefs come roaring into play. For example, an international counselor got admitted to the health center because of flulike symptoms. The nurse brought a classic ‘sick person’ breakfast the next morning: dry toast and some ginger ale. No way would the counselor eat that: ‘It’ll make me throw up!’ He wanted a bowl in which there was an apple that had been grated and allowed to turn brown. That’s ‘sick food’ in his country.