The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-century United States

The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-century United States PDF Author: Angela G. Ray
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Angela Ray provides a refreshing new look at the lyceum lecture system as it developed in the United States from the 1820s to the 1880s. She argues that the lyceum contributed to the creation of an American "public" at a time when the country experienced a rapid change in land area, increasing immigration, and a revolution in transportation, communication technology, and social roles. The history of the lyceum in the nineteenth century illustrates a process of expansion, diffusion, and eventual commercialization. In the late 1820s, a politically and economically dominant culture--the white Protestant northeastern middle class--institutionalized the practice of public debating and public lecturing for education and moral uplift. In the 1820s and 1830s, the lyceum was characterized by organized groups in cities and towns, particularly in the Northeast and the Old Northwest (now the Midwest). These groups were established to promote debate, to create a setting for study, and to provide a forum for members' lecturing. By the 1840s and 1850s, however, most lyceums concentrated on the sponsorship of public lectures, presented for institutional profit as well as public instruction and entertainment. Eventually, lyceum lectures became a commercial enterprise and desirable platform for celebrities who wished to expand their incomes from lecturing.

The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-century United States

The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-century United States PDF Author: Angela G. Ray
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Angela Ray provides a refreshing new look at the lyceum lecture system as it developed in the United States from the 1820s to the 1880s. She argues that the lyceum contributed to the creation of an American "public" at a time when the country experienced a rapid change in land area, increasing immigration, and a revolution in transportation, communication technology, and social roles. The history of the lyceum in the nineteenth century illustrates a process of expansion, diffusion, and eventual commercialization. In the late 1820s, a politically and economically dominant culture--the white Protestant northeastern middle class--institutionalized the practice of public debating and public lecturing for education and moral uplift. In the 1820s and 1830s, the lyceum was characterized by organized groups in cities and towns, particularly in the Northeast and the Old Northwest (now the Midwest). These groups were established to promote debate, to create a setting for study, and to provide a forum for members' lecturing. By the 1840s and 1850s, however, most lyceums concentrated on the sponsorship of public lectures, presented for institutional profit as well as public instruction and entertainment. Eventually, lyceum lectures became a commercial enterprise and desirable platform for celebrities who wished to expand their incomes from lecturing.

The Cosmopolitan Lyceum

The Cosmopolitan Lyceum PDF Author: Tom F. Wright
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781625340597
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From the 1830s to the 1900s, a circuit of lecture halls known as the lyceum movement flourished across the United States. At its peak, up to a million people a week regularly attended talks in local venues, captivated by the words of visiting orators who spoke on an extensive range of topics. The movement was a major intellectual and cultural force of this nation-building period, forming the creative environment of writers and public figures such as Frederic Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Anna Dickinson, and Mark Twain. The phenomenon of the lyceum has commonly been characterized as inward looking and nationalistic. Yet as this collection of essays reveals, nineteenth-century audiences were fascinated by information from around the globe, and lecturers frequently spoke to their fellow Americans of their connection to the world beyond the nation and helped them understand exotic ways of life. Never simple in its engagement with cosmopolitan ideas, the lyceum provided a powerful public encounter with international currents and crosscurrents, foreshadowing the problems and paradoxes that continue to resonate in our globalized world. This book offers a major reassessment of this important cultural phenomenon, bringing together diverse scholars from history, rhetoric, and literary studies. The twelve essays use a range of approaches, cover a wide chronological timespan, and discuss a variety of performers both famous and obscure. In addition to the volume editor, contributors include Robert Arbour, Thomas Augst, Susan Branson, Virginia Garnett, Peter Gibian, Sara Lampert, Angela Ray, Evan Roberts, Paul Stob, Mary Zboray, and Ronald Zboray.

Democracy as Discussion

Democracy as Discussion PDF Author: William M. Keith
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739115077
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Using primary sources from archives around the country, Democracy as Discussion traces the early history of the Speech field, the development of discussion as an alternative to debate, and the Deweyan, Progressive philosophy of discussion that swept the United States in the early twentieth century.

The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-century United States

The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-century United States PDF Author: Angela G. Ray
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN:
Category : Lectures and lecturing
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Angela Ray provides a refreshing new look at the lyceum lecture system as it developed in the United States from the 1820s to the 1880s.

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics PDF Author: John D. Kerkering
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108841899
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
This volume addresses the political contexts in which nineteenth-century American literature was conceived, consumed, and criticized. It shows how a variety of literary genres and forms, such as poetry, drama, fiction, oratory, and nonfiction, engaged with political questions and participated in political debate.

Thinking Together

Thinking Together PDF Author: Angela G. Ray
Publisher: Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation
ISBN: 9780271080888
Category : EDUCATION
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Explores the myriad ways that people in the nineteenth century grappled with questions of learning, belonging, civic participation, and deliberation. Focuses on the dynamics of gender, race, region, and religion, and how individuals and groups often excluded from established institutions developed knowledge useful for public life.

The Strange Genius of Mr. O

The Strange Genius of Mr. O PDF Author: Carolyn Eastman
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
When James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as Mr. O, counting the nation's leading politicians and intellectuals among his admirers. And then, like so many meteoric American luminaries afterward, he fell from grace. The Strange Genius of Mr. O is at once the biography of a remarkable performer--a gaunt Scottish orator who appeared in a toga--and a story of the United States during the founding era. Ogilvie's career featured many of the hallmarks of celebrity we recognize from later eras: glamorous friends, eccentric clothing, scandalous religious views, narcissism, and even an alarming drug habit. Yet he captivated audiences with his eloquence and inaugurated a golden age of American oratory. Examining his roller-coaster career and the Americans who admired (or hated) him, this fascinating book renders a vivid portrait of the United States in the midst of invention.

Peculiar Rhetoric

Peculiar Rhetoric PDF Author: Bjorn F. Stillion Southard
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496823737
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Winner of the Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award awarded by the Public Address Division of the National Communication Association The African colonization movement occupies a troubling rhetorical territory in the struggle for racial equality in the United States. For white colonizationists, the movement seemed positioned as a welcome compromise between slavery and abolition. For free blacks, colonization offered the hope of freedom, but not within America’s borders. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard indicates how politics and identity were negotiated amid the intense public debate on race, slavery, and freedom in America. Operating from a position of power, white advocates argued that colonization was worthy of massive support from the federal government. Stillion Southard pores over the speeches of Henry Clay, Elias B. Caldwell, and Abraham Lincoln, which engaged with colonization during its active deliberation. Between Clay’s and Caldwell’s speeches at the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816 and Lincoln’s final public effort to encourage colonization in 1862, Stillion Southard analyzes the little-known speeches and writings of free blacks who wrestled with colonization’s conditional promises of freedom. He examines an array of discourses to probe the complex issues of identity confronting free blacks who attempted to meaningfully engage in colonization efforts. From a peculiarly voiced “Counter Memorial” against the ACS to the letters of wealthy black merchant Louis Sheridan negotiating for his passage to Liberia to the civically minded orations of Hilary Teage in Liberia, Stillion Southard brings to light the intricate rhetoric of blacks who addressed colonization to Africa.

Lecturing the Atlantic

Lecturing the Atlantic PDF Author: Tom F. Wright
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019066195X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In the early nineteenth century, the public lecture emerged as one of the Anglo-American world's most important cultural forms. On both sides of the Atlantic, audiences and performers transformed a cultural practice with origins in the medieval cloister into an unexpected flashpoint medium of public life. In the United States, as part of the "lyceum movement," lecturing became crucial to literary and political life, multiple social reform movements, and the rise of public intellectualism, offering speakers from across the cultural spectrum a platform from which to promote their ideas and explain contemporary life. Lecturing the Atlantic argues for a new interpretation of this neglected institution. It reorients our understanding of the lyceum by seeing it as an international and cross-media phenomenon patterned by cultural investment in an "Anglo-American commons." Tom F. Wright shows how some of the mid-century North Atlantic world's most enduring cultural figures, such as Frederick Douglass, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as fascinating marginal voices such as Lola Montez and John B. Gough, used lecture hall discussions of a transatlantic imaginary to offer powerful commentaries on slavery, progress, comedy, order, tradition, and reform. Crucially, this world was a matter as much of print as performance, since as the book reveals, a remarkable culture of newspaper commentary allowed oratory to resonate far beyond the realm of the lecture hall. Through a series of inventive readings of Anglo-American relations as understood through performance and print re-mediation, Wright connects the transatlantic turn in cultural studies to important recent debates in media theory and public sphere scholarship. Lecturing the Atlantic speaks to those interested in the literature and history of Victorian Britain and the early US, to students of performance, communication and rhetoric, and all those seeking a deeper understanding of nineteenth-century public culture.

William James and the Art of Popular Statement

William James and the Art of Popular Statement PDF Author: Paul Stob
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 162895048X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, no other public intellectual was as celebrated in America as the influential philosopher and psychologist William James. Sought after around the country, James developed his ideas in lecture halls and via essays and books intended for general audiences. Reaching out to and connecting with these audiences was crucial to James—so crucial that in 1903 he identified “popular statement,” or speaking and writing in a way that animated the thought of popular audiences, as the “highest form of art.” Paul Stob’s thought-provoking history traces James’s art of popular statement through pivotal lectures, essays, and books, including his 1878 lectures in Baltimore and Boston, “Talks to Teachers on Psychology,” “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” and “Pragmatism.” The book explores James’s unique approach to public address, which involved crafting lectures in science, religion, and philosophy around ordinary people and their experiences. With democratic bravado, James confronted those who had accumulated power through various systems of academic and professional authority, and argued that intellectual power should be returned to the people. Stob argues that James gave those he addressed a central role in the pursuit of knowledge and fostered in them a new intellectual curiosity unlike few scholars before or since.