The first full-length study of skiing in the United States, this book traces the history of the sport from its utilitarian origins to its advent as a purely recreational and competitive activity. During the mid-1800s, inhabitants of frontier mining communities in the Sierra and Rocky mountains used skis for many practical reasons, including mail and supply delivery, hunting, and railroad repair. In some towns skis were so common that, according to one California newspaper, the ladies do nearly all their shopping and visiting on them. But it was Norwegian immigrants in the Midwest, clinging to their homeland traditions, who first organized the skisport. Through the founding of local clubs and the National Ski Association, this ethnic group dominated American skiing until the 1930s. At this time, a wave of German immigrants infused America with the ethos of what we today call Alpine skiing. This type of skiing became increasingly popular, especially in the East among wealthy collegians committed to the romantic pursuit of the strenuous life. Ski clubs proliferated in towns and on college campuses and specialized resorts cropped up from New England to California. At the same time, skiing became mechanized with tows and lifts, and the blossoming equipment and fashion industries made a business of the sport. On the eve of World War II, as the book concludes its story, all the elements were in place for the explosion in recreational and competitive skiing that erupted after 1945.

Skiing into Modernity is the story of how skiing moved from Europe's Scandinavian periphery to the mountains of central Europe, where it came to define the modern Alps and set the standard for skiing across the world. Denning offers a fresh, sophisticated, and engaging cultural and environmental history of skiing that alters our understanding of the sport and reveals how leisure practices evolve in unison with our changing relationship to nature. Denning probes the modernist self-definition of Alpine skiers and the sport's historical appeal for individuals who sought to escape city strictures while achieving mastery of mountain environments through technology and speed two central features distinguishing early twentieth-century cultures. Skiing into Modernity surpasses existing literature on the history of skiing to explore intersections between work, tourism, leisure, development, environmental destruction, urbanism, and more.