Jeff Wiltse’s Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America is one of the best history books I have come across as a literature enthusiast. The writer has beautifully portrayed the history of swimming pools and how its functions have changed over time. Book does a great job of explaining how and why municipal swimming pools in the northern United States were transformed from austere public baths—where blacks, immigrants, and native-born white laborers swam together, but men and women, rich and poor, and young and old did not—to leisure resorts, where practically everyone in the community except black Americans swam together. The history of swimming pools dramatizes America’s contested transition from an industrial to a modern society (page 2)
June 21, 1884. Boston opened one of the first municipal swimming pool. Pools became an instant attraction among the city folks. Young and working boys of the city looked at these swimming pools from a different point of view. They looked upon as a place to clean themselves. This marked the beginning of a change in Swimming pools history in North America. These young men, would take bath naked and use foul language. In the mid-1800’s. Many big cities like, New York, Milwaukee, Philadelphia passed an…show more content… Hence the city pool officials made rules and regulations to use the pools. The intended purpose of the early swimming pools was for the working class men and women to clean themselves but it turned out that the pool was used by young boys for recreation purposes. At the end of the nineteenth century, two distinct pool cultures existed in America. Working-class boys had created a play and pleasure-centered culture at municipal pools. Elite and middle-class men had developed a more serious and orderly culture at private pools that reflected the competitive and directed character of Victorian
