The lyceum and public culture in the nineteenth-century United States

About this book

This book offers a narrative history of the lyceum in the United States from 1826 to about 1880. It focuses particularly on the development of the lecture circuits of the mid-nineteenth century, and it highlights the ways that social reformers adapted their reformist messages for a commercial medium and a popular audience. In addition to a historical summary, the book offers four in-depth case studies of different moments in lyceum history: the publication of Josiah Holbrook's Boston-based periodical *Family Lyceum* in the 1830s; the sponsorship of public lecture courses by a young men's lyceum in Milwaukee in the mid-1850s; the development of Anna Dickinson's major lecture of 1869-70, "Whited Sepulchres"; and the lyceum lecturing of Frederick Douglass, particularly after the Civil War. In appendixes, the book also provides two lecture texts by Dickinson and Douglass that have never before been published. This book can be described as cultural history, history of communication, and rhetorical analysis.