I don’t think I’d deal with plague or bear attacks with much aplomb.
ETA: Also, life before the 20th century was not so great for women.
Like Siam Sam, I’d definitely want to go Back to the Future… 
Barring that, I’ll stay right here in the 21st century, thankuverymuch.
Right now, please. I enjoy having legal rights and career aspirations, thank you very much.
Or black people.
I wouldn’t go back any further than 1975 if I had to stay for good.
Then again, that would be an excellent opportunity to invest in this upstart software company I’ve heard about, so count me in.
Late Victorian England.
I look good in corsets, would like to have dined on the cuisine of Escoffier and witnessed the birth of Impressionism.
How would you do that? Bring machine guns?
Like others, I’ve no interest in living without things like penicillin, anaesthetics, and flouridated toothpaste, so if forced to go back in time, let be just find the winning numbers to the Lotto Max for last Friday and I’ll go back ten days.
Incidentally, I found this a fascinating question.
The thing is, if you legitimately want adventure, it’s out there. Most of the world is untamed wilderness. Adventure is there for anyone who wants it. You could spend a year exploring the Amazon, mount an expedition to the South Pole, portage across the lakes and rivers of northern Ontario, climb the world’s tallest mountains, spend a year working with Doctors without Borders in Africa. If you’re feeling like something a little unethical, become a mercenary or a drug runner, jobs which are always profitable and in demand, albeit dangerous. You can probably get MORE adventure now than you could in days past because it’s so easy to hop on a plane and get to where the action is.
That so many people don’t do this simply demonstrates that while most of us might say we like adventure, the truth is that deep inside, we very much do not. Human beings usually like security.
This is dependent on what I can have when I get there, really. If I have to be poor, the only era for it is right now. If I can be wealthy, on the other hand, I’d go back to be a rich young man in America around 1920. I’d split my time between New York City, Paris, and Berlin, spending and investing copiously with my future knowledge of what will hit and what won’t. I’d keep investing in America through the Depression and I’d give to charity as well. By 1941 I’d be in San Francisco attempting to use my influence to stop Japanese internment. (I’d probably have to restrain myself from giving Hoover a pair of stockings and Roosevelt a pair of tap shoes.) That would either ruin me or it wouldn’t; either way, I’d be in New York City by 1945 to catch the first flowering of Beat culture. I likely know enough about the history of technology to get rich and stay rich in post-War America assuming I have any investment capital at all in 1945.
But all this assumes I’d have to go and have to stay. If a jaunt, where I’d be back in time for two weeks and then come home, is out of the question I’d just as soon stay. However, if jaunting is possible I’d likely skip fairly liberally from the 1870s onwards to the 1990s, with special focus on Gilded Age/Belle Époque and Jazz Age America and Western Europe, roughly 1873-1914 on one end and 1919-1929 on the other.
I would be very curious about the idea of living near Rome when it was at its height.
I’d stick to today. Life for women, historically, has sucked.
This is absolutely true. There is a ton of adventure out there, and there are thousands of people living it. You could join the Peace Corps, go back to school for international relations, hitch hike to Mexico, find one of the many jobs in Afghanistan or Sudan, or just put a plane ticket to some remote place on your credit card and worry about paying for it later. Americans who do not have adventure do not have adventure because they have chosen other priorities.
In any case, I don’t think times past had much more adventure unless you were extremely rich. I think modern America is the first time when the middle class could afford to travel internationally just for the heck of it.
If I could keep all my current knowledge, I would just need to hop back maybe to 1985 for a little do over action. Tons of investment opportunities, riding AOL’s meteoric rise then bailing before it fell. Roll that over into a dozen companies that I know will do well in the near future. Dazzle Vegas with my ability to clean house at the sports book and once I am richer than god I will launch my giant fantasy company creating a massive disaster rescue team.
Sure, adventure is out there. And someday, I’d love to experience it. I’d love to go hunting in Africa, or to boat the Amazon. And hopefully I will someday.
But the thing is that in our modern life, completely abandoning society is not socially acceptable, and even though I’d love to do all those things, they’d make me an outcast in modern America.
Thing is, back in the 1800s, you didn’t need to go to Africa for this type of lifestyle. You could become a vigilante right in your home town.
No it wouldn’t. I’m an International Development student, and my friends study indigenous communities in Equador, teach in Saudi Arabia, train bankers in Kenya, study Arabic in Egypt, and run bars in the Congo. Most of them are also fairly normal people, and have families, friends and jobs just like everyone else. If you are content just to travel, go to any hostel in Asia and you will meet piles of nice ordinary people who lived cheap for a few years so that they can travel for a year or so. These are things that ordinary middle-class people can do if they make it a priority.
Not to say there aren’t sacrifices. If you want to stay nomadic you probably won’t be buying a house in the suburbs. If you want to work in war zones you are going to need to think long and hard about your plans for having kids. If you live abroad you are going to have to give up one set of a friends and make new ones. But you certainly don’t need to become some kind of crazy outcast.
I’m not trying to attack you, I’m hoping to be inspirational. There is a lot out there just for the taking if you are willing to take the risk. There was a time in my life when I probably said the same things you said, but man, I sure as hell found adventure.
Anyway, an ordinary person in the 1800s would probably still be too tired from working all day in the mills or on the farm to think too much about adventure. Gathering a posse to take out the local bandits may seem exciting from this side things, but I bet to them it felt as routine to them as something routine to you (like, say, driving a long distance) would seem thrilling to them.
The problem with doing all those things is that other people have already done them. There’s not really a lot of point mounting an expedition to the South Pole because not only have several people already done it (cf. Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, Fiennes, et al), there are several science/research bases in Antarctica, so there’s really not a lot to “Discover” there, at least for someone who isn’t a trained geologist or what have you. And even if you had the money and connections to get a ship and some supplies etc together, without the backing of someone like a Government or the Royal Geographic Society or something, you’d likely find yourself in breach of some obscure covenant of international law or another.
Lots of “Adventure” is also extremely dangerous- if you wanted to follow the Silk Road from [del]Constantinople[/del] Istanbul to [del]Cathay[/del] China you’ve got to cross several areas that can safely be considered “War Zones”, and again thanks to various local and international laws and treaties you’re liable to find yourself in all sorts of inadvertent trouble too. It’s not like the Golden Age of Exploration where the explorers had armour and horses and guns and the backing of entire countries and the locals had pointy sticks and shields made of cow hide.
And, expeditions are expensive. Far more expensive than the average person could ever hope to afford, and even if they could, why bother? There’s almost nothing left to “Discover” anyway.
In response to the OP, the historical time period I’d most like to live in (assuming inoculation against everything modern medical science can inoculate against, and access to a machine which can reach across the timelines to acquire modern medicines as needed) would be in one of the exotic British Colonies (India, Malaya/The Straits Settlements, Egypt, somewhere like that) at the height of the British Empire in the 1920s.