Ebook: Skiing into modernity: a cultural and environmental history

'Skiing into Modernity' argues that from the moment that skiers took to the Alps of central Europe, around 1880, the interaction between skiers and the Alps proved transformative: the Alps modernized skiing, and skiing modernized the Alps. The unique terrain of the Alps demanded that skiers alter their equipment and their practice of the sport. In the process, skiers elaborated an ideology called 'Alpine modernism' that synthesized the Romantic devotion to nature with the modernist celebration of speed, technology, and spectacle. As a result, Alpine skiing was uniquely attuned to the 20th-century age of mass culture, and the sport of skiing both formed and reflected that era's democratization, commercialization, and obsession with leisure.