The Art of Doing Nothing: Summer Holidays Around the World

From the reading: Escape Season: The Surprisingly Political History of the Holiday

Few things feel as natural as packing a bag and heading somewhere warm in summer. Yet the idea of a holiday — time deliberately set aside for rest and pleasure — is relatively modern. For most of human history, rest was not a right but a luxury reserved for the very rich. It was the Industrial Revolution that changed everything. Factory workers in nineteenth-century Britain began campaigning for time off, and by the 1870s, the Bank Holiday Act gave workers their first legally protected days of rest. The summer holiday, as we know it, was essentially a political achievement.