Why fear of big cities led to the creation of Summer Camps:  Millions of children pack their bags each year and head to camps ranging from the rustic to the super-luxurious. But it was not always so.  As temperatures climb, millions of children all over the United States pack their bags each year and head to sleep away camps ranging from the rustic to the super-luxurious.  But it wasn't always so. Until the late 19th century, summers were for children to work or play in unstructured environments:  Tag, hide-and-seek or hanging around adult work environments, then returning to their families at night.  Since compulsory education laws only came about in the 1880's, sometimes these activities weren't exclusive to the summer season. Yet as the U.S. industrialized and both native-born transplants and immigrants flocked to crowded Northeastern cities, moral reformers and educators panicked.  A new generation of children, especially boys, they fretted, were missing out on the character-building, health-promoting experiences of hardy rural life:  Some even mentioned the peril of "dying of indoor-ness."  A stint at summer camp- surrounded by nature and engaged in hard work and healthy play, all under the guidance of counselors who modeled moral uprightness- was thought to be the perfect solution.    Either genuinely Bucolic or painstakingly constructed to suit romantic ideas of what a rural encampment should be like.  This new social institution was soon embraced by many educators, philanthropists, and health professionals alike.  These early summer camps targeted middle-class, urban boys-who it was feared were being "mollycoddled" by overbearing mothers and female teachers in the overly "feminized" relms of home and school.  They needed a dose of savagery, common opinion held, lest they become "sissified."      Yet this middle-class project promoted an idea that reformers had first piloted with the working class:          In the 1850's, New York City's Children's Aid Society had shuttled "street rats" over westward-to be adopted by Christian farm families who were believed to be their last best hope for salvation from a life of poverty and vice.  This "uplift" mission also energized the first generation of summer camp boosters, who like many progressive reformers believed the thousands of Eastern and Southern European children crowded into tenements with their foreign parents and unfamiliar customs would otherwise spend this summer loafing on the hot city streets, hardly learning the virtues or practices of American Citizenship.    African Americans excluded from segregated camps, established their own institutions, like Massachusetts' Camp Atwater (1921), devoted to provide recreational, social networking, and cultural opportunities to a growing Black middle class.  Jews, Christians and even socialists, all established summer camps to promote spiritual, cultural and political solidarity.  Camp was catching on.  By the 1930's, it was considered such an important rite of passage that "new deal money" expanded philanthropic coffers to finance children's summer sojourns even during the Depression.  During WW II, camp began to take on its modern form.  Rather than prepare kids for adulthood, camps aimed to prolong and protect childhood innocence.  Camps became places where children could explore individual passions-the arts-sports or outdoor life-in contrast to the presumed regidity of school curricula, watchful gaze of dating parents, and the acculturating ethos that gave rise to camps in the first place.  A professionalized camping industry that now works with private families, philanthropists and public agencies has expanded to create this expansive landscape.