Thinking Together

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction (Angela G. Ray and Paul Stob)

Part 1: Disrupting Narratives

1. The Portable Lyceum in the Civil War (Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray)

2. Women’s Entrepreneurial Lecturing in the Early National Period (Granville Ganter)

3. Mobilizing Irish America in the Antebellum Lecture Hall (Tom F. Wright)

4. Authentic Imitation or Perverse Original? Learning About Race from America’s Popular Platforms (Kirt H. Wilson and Kaitlyn G. Patia)

Part 2: Distinctive Voices

5. A Lyceum Diaspora: Hilary Teage and a Liberian Civic Identity (Bjørn F. Stillion Southard)

6. Secret Knowledge, Public Stage; Joseph Smith’s King Follett Discourse (Richard Benjamin Crosby)

7 .The “Perfect Delight” of Dramatic Reading: Gertrude Kellogg and the Post-Civil War Lyceum (Sara E. Lampert)

8. Talking Music: Amy Fay and the Origins of the Lecture Recital (E. Douglas Bomberger)

9. Hinduism for the West: Swami Vivekananda’s Pluralism at the World’s Parliament of Religions (Scott R. Stroud)

Conclusion: Placing Platform Culture in Nineteenth-Century American Life (Carolyn Eastman)

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

“Lecture platforms such as the lyceum were the true ‘social media’ of the nineteenth century, forging communities in pursuit of common understanding, insight, and wisdom. Ray and Stob have collected studies showing that the cultural practices of platform culture were robust even in the face of social disruption and among marginalized as well as mainstream populations. Each essay displays exemplary scholarship; together they illumine a vital but often neglected dimension of nineteenth-century public culture.”

—David Zarefsky, author of Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate