James E. West and the history of the Boy Scouts of America.

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

In celebration of its 100th anniversary of Boy Scouts of America and its publication Boys' Life, this book is a collection of the best Boys' Life pages of news, nature, sports, history, fiction, science, comics, and Scouting information. All pages in this collection are facsimile reproductions of the magazine's original pages.

A Centennial History tells the full, rich story of Scouting from it's original British roots to its adaptation in America, from the earliest Scout camps through the Scouts' contributions during World Wars I and II, the Depression and up to the aid they offered victims of Hurricane Katrina. In the course of telling the BSA's history, the book honors many notable Scouts who have raised its reputation to the highest heights of American consciousness. With 299 pages, this exquisite, limited edition book contains vivid and some never before seen photographs, memorabilia and removable replicas of rare documents such as the original Pinewood Derby rulebook, a World War I poster distributed by the Boy Scouts of America, and a letter to the Scouts from President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This blueprint for the Boy Scout movement not only provides energetic tips on camping, tracking, and woodcraft, but offers proper Victorian-era advice on manners, self-discipline, and good citizenship. Includes the original illustrations.

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.

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

In a timely contribution to current debates over the psychology of boys and the construction of their social lives, On My Honor explores the folk customs of adolescent males in the Boy Scouts of America during a summer encampment in California's Sierra Nevada. Drawing on more than twenty years of research and extensive visits and interviews with members of the troop, Mechling uncovers the key rituals and play events through which the Boy Scouts shapes boys into men. He describes the campfire songs, initiation rites, games, and activities that are used to mold the Scouts into responsible adults. The themes of honor and character alternate in this new study as we witness troop leaders offering examples in structure, discipline, and guidance, and teaching scouts the difficult balance between freedom and self-control. What results is a probing look into the inner lives of boys in our culture and their rocky transition into manhood. On My Honor provides a provocative, sometimes shocking glimpse into the sexual awakening and moral development of young men coming to grips with their nascent desires, their innate aggressions, their inclination toward peer pressure and violence, and their social acculturation. On My Honor ultimately shows how the Boy Scouts of America continues to edify and mentor young men against the backdrop of controversies over freedom of religious expression, homosexuality, and the proposed inclusion of female members. While the organization's bureaucracy has taken an unyielding stance against gay men and atheists, real live Scouts are often more open to plurality than we might assume. In their embrace of tolerance, acceptance, and understanding, troop leaders at the local level have the power to shape boys into emotionally mature men.