August 1926: Boy Scouts crammed into a tent during a camping holiday at Muswell Hill in London. (Fox Photos/Getty Images)

While summer camps these days could mean a variety of things, everything from sleepaway camp to basketball camp, the concept originated in the 1880s as a way for children to escape urban life and bask in the beauty of nature.

“Summer camps [grew out of a] new appreciation for the wilderness and out of turn-of-the century anxieties about the disappearance of the wilder parts of nature,” Abigail A. Van Slyck, an art history professor at Connecticut College, wrote in her book “A Manufactured Wilderness.”Naturalist John Muir, who encouraged many to go out and experience nature, also brought new ideas about the wilderness to the forefront, according to the author. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” Muir wrote in one of his journals as part of the book “John of the Mountains.”Due to this new outlook on the wild, in addition to programs from Theodore Roosevelt, a series of natural parks were established between 1885 and 1908: Adirondack Park, Sequoia National Park, Yosemite National Park and Grand Canyon National Park.Camps, and these national parks, became a way to reclaim the natural world.“In manufacturing a new type of wilderness out of what – in many cases- had been farmland, summer camps (and to some extent, other rural resorts) seemed to turn back the clock, reversing the westward motion of the advancing frontier and (particularly at eastern camps) returning the landscape to something that evoked its pristine natural form,” Van Slyck stated.Many adults also felt that children were losing several values in modern-day society, something they felt summer camps could restore, according to “A Manufactured Wilderness.”“At summer camps, these antimodern impulses took many forms, but a romanticized emulation of frontier life was chief among them,” wrote Van Slyck. “Installed in a rustic setting devoid of modern technologies of comfort (at least in these early decades of the twentieth century), campers could learn some of the survival skills that had sustained their pioneering forebears.”Around 1960, camps as they had once been started to decline, according to “A Manufactured Wilderness,” while specialty and day camps saw a rise.Today, summer camps are still popular with more than 11 million children and adults attending camp in the U.S., according to the American Camping Association’s survey in 2010 – with a total of 9,500 nonprofit camps and 2,500 privately owned.The slideshow above depicts what summer camp life was like from the late 1800s to 1900s in Europe and in the U.S.

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A man on duty at the Holborn Oasis swimming pool in London, suffering in the July heat. (Keystone/Getty Images)