ABSTRACT
The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how history can serve as context for leisure. The chapter is not as such a history of leisure, a complex subject well covered elsewhere from several angles. For instance, Spracklen (2011) offers a rich general history of leisure dating from ancient Greece and Rome to the present. There are also numerous histories of particular areas of research as they relate to leisure, for example, work (e.g., Stebbins, 2004, Chapter 2), volunteering, (Nichols, Holmes, & Baum, 2013), and library and information science (Hartel, 2010). Further, ethnographic research on particular (usually serious) leisure activities often includes in reports of them a section containing their history [see, for example, Fine, 1998, pp. 17–19 on mushrooming; Stebbins, 1993d, Chapter 1 on Canadian football; and T. R. Williams (2000) on amateur astronomy].
