| During Reconstruction, increasing numbers of northern invalids and tourists began traveling into the south Atlantic states, especially during the winter months. Initially, residents in certain southern towns adapted their communities to welcome these seasonal visitors. By the 1890s, however, entrepreneurs had created independent and self-contained resorts designed solely for the purpose of catering to upper-class men and women who placed increasing value on the quality and meaning of their time away from work and home. This study focuses on the nexus between the "production" of these seasonal retreats in terms of the built environments as they were conceived, constructed, and promoted, and the "consumption" of these technological systems by each resort's clientele. I also offer an analysis of the complex network of resort employees who earned their livelihoods by realizing the entrepreneurs' visions and fulfilling the visitors' expectations. Scholars have largely overlooked the significance of these seasonal enclaves as reflections of the ongoing leisure revolution in the United States. Historians continue to contribute insightful, new perspectives on summer vacationing, regional tourism, and specific resorts, yet no one has offered the type of broad, theoretical analysis presented in this dissertation.;The winter resorts marked temporal and geographic shifts in the manner and style in which certain North Americans incorporated sport and outdoor recreation into their lives. Having acquired the necessary time and disposable wealth, affluent, white northerners began engaging in leisure activities year round---particularly golf---by spending part or all of the winter at southern resorts. Because these seasonal sanctuaries attracted clienteles from cities predominately outside the South, the geographic range of these travelers' excursions took on transregional, even transnational, dimensions.;By the turn of the twentieth century, visitors cultivated homogeneous communities or, more accurately, "lifestyle enclaves," that they believed would help immunize themselves against the unhealthy aspects---both mental and physical---of modern urban life. Departing from the conventional view of a monolithic "leisure class," I argue that the winter resorters placed great importance on subtle distinctions among themselves and, by joining specific enclaves scattered throughout Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, formulated individual and group identities based on particular social activities, everyday practices, and a collective "sense of place."... |
