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Rudy Koshar
expected from it, how long it should last, and how it should be regulated. Social
history’s privileging of the work experience may have been defensible when the
topic was early industrialization, when leisure time was a precious commodity for
the majority of laborers. As the historian’s view moves closer to the present,
however, it is the full interdependence of notions of work and leisure that offer a
better conceptual point of departure. It was precisely this interdependence that led
some interwar British commentators to claim that their country’s slow decline in
industrial efficiency was caused in part by the working man’s overdeveloped
interest in sport and hobbies.
Beyond this, the preceding chapters suggest that political, economic, cultural,
social, and environmental factors are embedded in the history of leisure practices.
To disentangle them analytically is part of the project of historical mapping as well.
As Stephen Harp notes, the history of tourism cannot dispense with the history of
labor, since leisure travel is made possible by the labor of others. Environmental
history enters the picture at every turn, whether the subject is motorized tourism
on the German Autobahn, train travel through the “unknown France” of the
provinces, or smoking habits of British men and women. In the United States,
leisure often operated as the point of mediation between the social and the natural.
“Factories and cities took humans away from nature,” writes Richard White of
American perceptions, “leisure brought them back.” 35 What variations on this
theme existed for Europeans? Politics, too, play a role in the story, and not only
because identities formed in leisure activities often provide the basis for political
and social movements, an important subject to which we return below. Leora
Auslander’s sources are the direct result of a policy of genocide, it must be
remembered, and here too the historical analysis of leisure leads the scholar
directly to questions of the distribution of power, of winners and losers, of
perpetrators and victims, and of trauma and pleasure. Scholarship often recognizes
such interconnections, but the continuous tendency of historical research to place
leisure culture “after” other categories, whether those categories are derived from
economic, political, or social history, suggests that the point needs explicit
reinforcement.
The mapping of the histories of leisure needs to be done in a more practical
sense as well. What are the proper subjects? This volume cannot claim to offer a
comprehensive overview of the vast sphere of leisure practices, to be sure. Among
the areas we have not explored are cinema going, mass sporting spectacles such
as soccer or rugby, and hobbies. Some themes are obvious, and have received
adequate attention, but what of activities such as smoking, which, as Hilton
notes, is not confined to specific sites or times, or listening to music on MP3
players, which can be done at work, at home, or even (to teachers’ dismay) in
classrooms? Some of the more standard topics have gained increased attention in
the 1990s, but even these are rather unevenly mapped. Travel is now one of the
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