Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America: Citizenship, Race, and the Environment, 1910-1930

Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America: Citizenship, Race, and the Environment, 1910-1930

Jordan, Benjamin René

Paperback

20th Century United States HistoryGeneral World HistoryMen's Studies

ISBN10: 1469627655
ISBN13: 9781469627656
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: Apr 25 2016
Pages: 306
Weight: 1.04
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

In this illuminating look at gender and Scouting in the United States, Benjamin René Jordan examines how in its founding and early rise, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) integrated traditional Victorian manhood with modern, corporate-industrial values and skills. While showing how the BSA Americanized the original British Scouting program, Jordan finds that the organization's community-based activities signaled a shift in men's social norms, away from rugged agricultural individualism or martial primitivism and toward productive employment in offices and factories, stressing scientific cooperation and a pragmatic approach to the responsibilities of citizenship.

By examining the BSA's national reach and influence, Jordan demonstrates surprising ethnic diversity and religious inclusiveness in the organization's founding decades. For example, Scouting officials' preferred urban Catholic and Jewish working-class immigrants and modernizable African Americans and Native Americans over rural whites and other traditional farmers, who were seen as too backward to lead an increasingly urban-industrial society. In looking at the revered organization's past, Jordan finds that Scouting helped to broaden mainstream American manhood by modernizing traditional Victorian values to better suit a changing nation.

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