Name: “A Nation of Pic-Nickians”: Middle-Class Americans’, with guest speaker Reynolds Scott-Childress
Start: 2025-01-27T19:00:00-05:00
Location: Elting Memorial Library

$\u201cA Nation of Pic-Nickians\u201d: Middle-Class Americans\u2019, with guest speaker Reynolds Scott-Childress$

The New Paltz Historical Society wishes you All the Best for the coming Holidays and the New Year.
Our January Guest Speaker is Reynolds Scott-Childress, and his talk is titled “A Nation of Pic-Nickians”: Middle-Class Americans’ Appropriation of Nature in the Hudson River Valley, 1820-1865. This presentation will explore the invention of American picnicking in the 19th-century Hudson Valley.
The Americans who first established the foundations of middle-class culture in the Jacksonian era faced a dilemma. They did not have a clear way to proclaim their preeminence as a class in the hurly burly culture of the day. Competing with farmers, plantation owners, landlords, and other property owning classes, they hit on a solution: They would redefine the “nature” of American nature in their own image.
But this solution raised a practical problem: How could people so associated with urban culture claim they were the true and best “readers” of the land out beyond the city? Their answer: Picnic!
This presentation examines why middle-class New Yorkers invented the picnic as a way to stake their claim to being the embodiment of American national identity.
Our Guest Speaker: Reynolds Scott-Childress teaches history at SUNY New Paltz. His research concerns the creation and uses of racial, class, and national categories. He is the author, most recently, of “Telling Difficult Stories, Realizing DEI Values: The SUNY New Paltz Building Renaming Project, 2017-2018” in the Hudson Valley Review (2024).