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On the Trail: An Outdoor Book for Girls by Adelia B. Beard and Lina Beard
These descriptions of leisure-time activities for Victorian girls were designed to cultivate their curiosity and inventiveness, and to help them gain self-confidence regarding their competence and talents.
Explore, hike, discover, be crafty and have fun with friends or alone, indoors or outside! Written for children in 1893, and valuable for both kids and adults today, here's a magical cornucopia of projects, devices, toys, gifts, dolls, recipes, decorations, perfumes, wax and clay modeling, oil and water-color painting and games, all with clear and practical directions for how to make and play them. Vintage Americana by the Beard sisters, two of the founders of the girls scouting movement (when they weren't campaigning for women's rights). As Anne M. Boylan writes in her foreword, "Healthy and spirited, the American Girl thinks nothing of taking a ten-mile 'romp' through woods and fields with a group of friends, and collects flowers and leaves for preservation or presentation to friends and relations. Above all, however, the Beards' girl is handy. She can make a hat rack, a screen, or a bookshelf; fashion a macrame hammock or a cornhusk doll; and draw, paint, sculpt, or decorate a room...By emphasizing what girls can do, The American Girl's Handy Book presents a portrait of girlhood that is vigorous, active, and full of possibilities."
"Things Worth Doing and How To Do Them" by Lina Beard is a book for girls about merry frolics and active games that stimulate the health and renew the vitality of the body and there are scores of charming things for willing hands to make which are not only worth the making but which bring skill to the fingers and breadth and energy to the mind. Excerpt: "A FOURTH OF JULY LAWN FROLIC THIS is not to be a formal lawn party, but a genuine, fun-provoking Fourth of July frolic with everyone in comfortable dress appropriate for active games. There is to be no dancing, no tennis, nothing in the way of ordinary entertainment except, perhaps, the refreshments, and they too should be as nearly in keepi...
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Reproduction of the original: Bee and Butterfly by Lucy Foster Madison
When did the kid who strolled the wooded path, trolled the stream, played pick-up ball in the back forty turn into the child confined to the mall and the computer screen? How did “Go out and play!” go from parental shooing to prescription? When did parents become afraid to send their children outdoors? Surveying the landscape of childhood from the Civil War to our own day, this environmental history of growing up in America asks why and how the nation’s children have moved indoors, often losing touch with nature in the process. In the time the book covers, the nation that once lived in the country has migrated to the city, a move whose implications and ramifications for youth Pamela Ri...
Each summer, millions of children complain, "There's nothing to do." Originally published in 1888, The American Boy's Handy Book resoundingly challenges this age-old dilemma by providing a huge number of ideas for fun and instructional projects for young boys. Everything from camping and kite building to raising dogs and building boats is detailed for the would-be adventurer and do-it your-selfer.