| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport, & Coney Island. By Jon Sterngass. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. x, 374 pp. $36.50, ISBN 0-8018-6586-7.)

Scholars have lately turned considerable attention to the study of leisure. How people relaxed and played, historians have learned, is as important as how they worked. Jon Sterngass's book, First Resorts, contributes to recent efforts to examine the specific places where Americans played. 1

Sterngass follows each of these places (Saratoga Springs, New York; Newport, Rhode Island; and Coney Island in New York City) closely, explaining how by the mid-nineteenth century they had become crowded public resorts, more alike than different from each other. Sterngass's descriptions of Newport, Saratoga, and Coney Island fit that of most fashionable nineteenth-century resorts: drawn by a desire to 'see and be seen,' visitors congregated on piazzas, on walkways, and in hotel parlors, parading in their finery, courting and flirting, dancing at fancy balls, and sometimes engaging in illicit sexual dalliances. These sorts of watering places became liminal spaces where men and women often experimented with forms of behavior unacceptable in everyday life. Using the work of Karen Halttunen, John Kasson, and others, Sterngass describes the resort culture of the nineteenth century as a stage upon which strangers could pose and pretend. . . .

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