Boy Scouts

About: Boy Scouts is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 338 publications have been published within this topic receiving 27994 citations.

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

Abstract: BOWLING ALONE warns Americans that their stock of "social capital", the very fabric of their connections with each other, has been accelerating down. Putnam describes the resulting impoverishment of their lives and communities. Drawing on evidence that includes nearly half a million interviews conducted over a quarter of a century in America, Putnam shows how changes in work, family structure, age, suburban life, television, computers, women's roles and other factors are isolating Americans from each other in a trend whose reflection can clearly be seen in British society. We sign 30 percent fewer petitions than we did ten years ago. Membership in organisations- from the Boy Scouts to political parties and the Church is falling. Ties with friends and relatives are fraying: we're 35 percent less likely to visit our neighbours or have dinner with our families than we were thirty years ago. We watch sport alone instead of with our friends. A century ago, American citizens' means of connecting were at a low point after decades of urbanisation, industrialisation and immigration uprooted them from families and friends. That generation demonstrated a capacity for renewal by creating the organisations that pulled Americans together. Putnam shows how we can learn from them and reinvent common enterprises that will make us secure, productive, happy and hopeful.

Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920

Abstract: Dissatisfied with a Victorian culture focused on domesticity and threatened by physical decline in sedentary office jobs, American men in the late 19th century sought masculine company in fraternal lodges and engaged in exercise to invigorate their bodies. One form of this new manly culture, developed out of the Protestant churches, was known as muscular Christianity. In this study, Clifford Putney details how Protestant leaders promoted competitive sports and physical education to create an ideal of Christian manliness. Though rooted in the new culture of manhood, muscular Christianity was conceived to reinvigorate Protestantism itself, which in the minds of many was increasingly failing to create masculine, forceful natures capable of withstanding an influx of Catholic immigrants. Putney analyzes the role of such dynamic organizations as the Boy Scouts and the Young Men's Christian Association in making Protestant Christianity a religion that attracted boys and men to the vigorous life. He also portrays the muscular Christian movement's vivid personalities, including evangelist Dwight L. Moody, psychologist G. Stanley Hall (who warned of "woman peril" in the churches), and Theodore Roosevelt, the rough-riding, safari-going advocate of the Strenuous Life for the manly Christian.

The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture

Abstract: Our current less-is-more impulse may have contemporary trappings, says David E. Shi, but the underlying ideal has been around for centuries. From Puritans and Quakers to Boy Scouts and hippies, our quest for the simple life is an enduring, complex tradition in American culture. Looking across more than three centuries of want and prosperity, war and peace, Shi introduces a rich cast of practitioners and proponents of the simple life, among them Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, Scott and Helen Nearing, and Jimmy Carter. In the diversity of their aspirations and failings, Shi finds that nothing is simple about our mercurial devotion to the ideal of plain living and high thinking. "Difficult choices are the price of simplicity," he writes in the book's revised epilogue. We may hedge a bit in the practice of simple living, and now and then we are driven by motives no deeper than nostalgia. Shi stresses, however, that the diverse efforts to avoid anxious social striving and compulsive materialism have been essential to the nation's spiritual health.

Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920

Abstract: Among established American institutions, few have been more successful or paradoxical than the Boy Scouts of America. David Macleod traces the social history of America in this scholarly account of the origins of the Boy Scouts and other character-building agencies, through which adults tried to restructure middle-class boyhood. Back in print; First paperback edition.