Antebellum Harvard students and the recreational exploration of the New England landscape

This paper examines a nineteenth-century geographic activity, the recreational exploration of the wilderness areas of northern New England and nearby environments by Harvard students. Conventions of literary expression and social behaviour spurred and shaped such activity, but undergirding these temporally-specific patterns were more universal characteristics of late-adolescent behaviour. Biological, anthropological and what may be called geographical imperatives led students to explore the limits of their regional environment and incorporate the values of the wilderness experience into their own maturational processes. The early journeys into the eastern wilderness of the geographical historian Francis Parkman are set in the context of these more universal institutional and behavioural patterns.