A term sometimes used synonymously with leisure. However, recreation is usually used to describe active leisure. Sometimes its use implies that the activities have positive value in terms of mental and physical therapy. See also physical recreation.

America's indigenous peoples enjoyed a wide array of recreational activities. Indians in the upper Midwest played lacrosse, while those living in the Spanish borderlands played versions of a Mesoamerican ball game. Native Americans throughout California chewed milkweed gum for pleasure, while boys from some Wisconsin tribes made tops of acorns, nuts, and oval stones. Singing, dancing, drumming, gambling, and smoking all played important roles in the social lives of many native peoples.

When English settlers first arrived on the eastern shore of North America, their view of the continent's native inhabitants was powerfully shaped by differing attitudes towards work and leisure. While Indian women generally gathered plants and tilled fields, native men "for the most part live idlely, they doe nothing but hunt and fish," observed one New England minister. William Byrd II, the scion of a wealthy Virginia family, added that Indian men "are quite idle, or at most employ'd only in the Gentlemanly Diversions of Hunting and Fishing." As these quotes suggest, in England hunting and fishing were considered recreational and were generally reserved for members of the gentry. They were vital, however, to the subsistence of native peoples.

In New England, the colonists' view that Indians were "indolent" or "slothful" savages was reinforced by an attitude that came to be known as the "Puritan work ethic." For centuries, societies had viewed labor as a necessity, while seeing leisure as more conducive to happiness. After the Reformation, however, some radical Protestant sects came to see "honest toil" as a sign of God's "chosen" or "elect," and to equate most forms of recreation with idle sinfulness. New England Puritans feared that dancing and drinking would lead to promiscuity, and they banned gambling and smoking (except at dinner) as wasters of time. The Massachusetts Bay Colony forbid "unnecessary" walking on Sunday, and the governor of Plymouth required colonists to work on Christmas. When fur trader Thomas Morton celebrated a traditional English May Day in the mid-1600s, Puritans burned his compound, cut down his maypole, and exiled him from the colony. The Puritans did, however, embrace moderate exercise, and they encouraged their followers to sing Psalms and read the Bible. Puritan children played with toys and dolls, while youth engaged in ball games and cricket.

By the late seventeenth century, growing secularization and commercial success had eroded Puritan austerity. Nevertheless, the Puritan work ethic had a powerful lingering effect on American society. An emerging middle class embraced a secular version of the work ethic and used it to define themselves against both the working class, who often viewed labor as simply necessary for pleasure, and some elites, who saw labor as the degrading province of servants and slaves. In the mid-eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin preached the work ethic in his widely read autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanac, and the religious Great Awakenings of the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries carried this attitude beyond New England.

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, colonists both north and south adapted traditional European recreational activities to their new home. Cockfighting spread through Virginia and the southern colonies, while New Englanders engaged in wrestling and cudgeling on the Boston Common. Fashionable New Yorkers paraded in powdered wigs and ruffles, while Southern gentry traveled to Williamsburg and Charleston for balls and plays. Transforming hunting from an elite to a popular sport, frontiersmen engaged in wolf drives and "ring hunts," in which a crowd would encircle an area of up to forty square miles and gradually close in on all the game within the ring. (One such hunt reportedly netted sixty bears, twenty-five deer, one hundred turkeys, and assorted smaller animals.) County fairs, weddings, and religious camp meetings also provided opportunities for recreation and socializing.

The Industrial Revolution that transformed the U.S. in the nineteenth century fundamentally altered the way many Americans spent their leisure time. As workers migrated from farms to cities and industrial towns, work—and thus recreation—became less dependent on the seasons. More importantly, the emergence of the factory system institutionalized the Puritan work ethic and imposed clock time on the masses. With employers dictating the length of their employees' days, the workday expanded to twelve hours or more in the early nineteenth century. Efforts to control workers were not entirely successful, however: At the Harper's Ferry Armory in western Virginia, for instance, many employees skipped work to go hunting or fishing.

The removal of work from the home and its centralization in factories also produced an increasinglysharp divide between work and recreation. For centuries, the line dividing the two had been porous. American Indians socialized while cooking or mending huts, and European colonists gathered for corn huskings, barn raisings, or candle-dipping parties. But just as factory owners tried to control their workers' hours, they also attempted to eliminate play from work. In 1846, for instance, a Pennsylvania textile factory banned "spiritous liquors, smoking or any kind of amusements" from its premises. Mill owners in Lowell, Massachusetts, required their female employees to live in dormitories and observe a strict 10 P.M. curfew. Children who worked long hours in factories or mines had little time or energy to play.

To a large degree, this separation of work and recreation was a gendered experience. Few middle-class women worked outside the home, and even female mill workers generally left the factory after they married and had children. Housewives—as well as women who took in boarders or did piecework in the home—tended to re-main more task than time conscious. They visited with neighbors between household chores, and interspersed drudgery with decorative arts.

In middle-class Victorian families, leisure time increasingly focused on the home, and women planned recreation for the entire family. Instructed by new magazines like the Godey's Lady's Book, they organized board games, family picnics, sing-alongs, and lawn games like croquet. By transforming their homes into refuges, they attempted to provide moral training and emotional sustenance for their husbands and children. One result of this new emphasis on the home was the makeover of many American holidays. In the early nineteenth century, the Fourth of July was celebrated with riotous communal drinking, but by the 1850s it was a time for family picnics. The family Christmas, complete with trees, carols, and an exchange of gifts, also emerged during the Victorian Era. (In the late nineteenth century, middle-class reformers used settlement houses, "friendly visitors," and field matrons to spread such "wholesome" home-based recreation to immigrant workers and Native Americans.)