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 lyc

Through extended readings of the works of P. T. Barnum, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Fanny Fern, Bonnie Carr O’Neill shows how c

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

This volume addresses the political contexts in which nineteenth-century American literature was conceived, consumed, and criticized. It shows how a variety of

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 b