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On this date in 1833, Captain Henry Nicholas Nicholls was hanged in London for sodomy. Sodomy — “buggery,” in the more evocative British phrase, often bowdlerized in court records as b-gg–y or the like — was a capital offense in England until 1861, when the penalty was reduced to “merely” life imprisonment.... Even though once or twice a year someone would hang for it and the scandal would send family fleeing his name, Old Blighty still had a vigorous underground gay scene in the 19th century. While Lord Byron was enjoying the easier same-sex access of the Ottoman lands, a...

Fishing in Twitchell Creek, NY (1903) If you’re going camping this summer, will you rough it on a wilderness hike, or relax in a yurt at a four-star resort? In the late nineteenth century, the tension between savoring the wilderness and recreating civilized life outdoors was very much on the minds of the first recreational campers, as Phoebe Kropp explains. After the Civil War, camping went from a necessity for soldiers and transient people to recreation for the upper-middle-class. Kropp argues that Victorian-era campers were playing around with the concept of comfort. For the upper-middle-class, keeping a comfortable home—rather than...

Victor Victorians. A Lesson in Real Morality March 18, 2007 BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist 'William Wilberforce,'' writes Eric Metaxas in Amazing Grace, "was the happy victim of his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a horrible disease that's ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it again -- and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed.'' What did Wilberforce ''cure''? Two centuries ago, on March 25, 1807, one very persistent British backbencher secured the...