This book is illustrated with full-color photographs and memorabilia items and the captures the adventure and spirit of the United States' largest youth organization.

"Featuring never-before-seen items from the National Scouting Museum"--Cover.

Depictions of the Boy Scouts in paintings by Norman Rockwell, 1913-1976, and by Joseph Csatari, 1977-2009.

This is a facsimile reprint of the very first Boy Scouts Handbook, complete with the wonderful vintage advertisements that accompanied the original 1911 edition, now in full color. Over 40 million copies of this book have been distributed since its first publication nearly 100 years ago. The original Boy Scouts Handbook standardized American scouting and emphasized the virtues and qualifications for scouting, delineating what the American Boy Scouts declared was needed to be a “well-developed, well-informed boy.” The book includes information on the organization of scouting, signs and signaling, camping, scouting games, and a description of several scouting honors. Scouts past and present will be fascinated to see how scouting has changed, as well as what has stayed the same over the years.

Mischa Honeck’s Our Frontier Is the World is a provocative account of how the Boy Scouts echoed and enabled American global expansion in the twentieth century. The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) has long been a standard bearer for national identity. The core values of the organization have, since its founding in 1910, shaped what it means to be an American boy and man. As Honeck shows, those masculine values had implications that extended far beyond the borders of the United States. Writing the global back into the history of one of the country’s largest youth organizations, Our Frontier Is the World details how the BSA operated as a vehicle of empire from the Progressive Era up to the countercultural moment of the 1960s. American boys and men wearing the Scout uniform never simply hiked local trails to citizenship; they forged ties with their international peers, camped in foreign lands, and started troops on overseas military bases. Scouts traveled to Africa and even sailed to icy Antarctica, hoisting the American flag and standing as models of loyalty, obedience, and bravery. Through scouting America’s complex engagements with the world were presented as honorable and playful masculine adventures abroad. Innocent fun and earnest commitment to doing a good turn, of course, were not the whole story. Honeck argues that the good-natured Boy Scout was a ready means for soft power abroad and gentle influence where American values, and democratic capitalism, were at stake. In other instances the BSA provided a pleasant cover for imperial interventions that required coercion and violence. At Scouting’s global frontiers the stern expression of empire often lurked behind the smile of a boy.