Director's Letter

Dear Colleague:

I invite you to join us at one of two sessions of THE AMERICAN LYCEUM AND PUBLIC CULTURE: THE ORATORY OF IDEALISM, OPPORTUNITY, AND ABOLITION IN THE 19TH CENTURY. These workshops will take place May 20-26 and May 27-June 2 as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops. In these workshops we will revisit a seminal period in American intellectual and social history, the age of the American Lyceum. I invite you to visit authentic Lyceum sites with us, to hear a selection of the great orations brought to life and delivered on the Lyceum stage, and to explore with other scholars the meaning and impact of this landmark movement in American history, both then and now.

The American Lyceum, founded in 1826 by Josiah Holbrook, is the first and one of the most important adult educational movements in American history. Dedicated to the laudable goal of “diffusing practical knowledge,” for the next seventy years the Lyceum became much more. It became, in fact, a national lecturing circuit, providing for its audiences a lively education in democratic learning. Every era brings with it new dreams and new challenges. The Lyceum movement is a vivid example of how Americans sought to define their culture in the age of Jackson, a time that Hellfire Nation author James Morone argues witnessed the "great awakening" of a people to the fact that they were “Americans.”

Why study the impact of the American Lyceum through oratory? First, America in the 19th century was what literary scholar Gerald Graff calls an “oratorical culture.” Today, mass media such as radio, television, and film create and sustain culture; in the 19th century, public speaking on the lecture circuits and in church pulpits shaped public attitudes and public debate. The Lyceum was one of the leading venues for such discussions, through which Americans struggled with the controversial issues of the day. As Angela Ray, author of The Lyceum and Public Culture Making notes, “Defining the terms and boundaries of American culture was a process of consensus-building and resistance, of accord and conflict.”

Secondly, great oratory, to paraphrase Hegel, is a “snapshot in time.” If we accept the notion that “writers turn blood into ink, and speakers turn ink into blood,” we come to understand orations as primary texts that move an audience at a critical moment in time to decide who they will be, what they will believe, and how they will act. As they listened to the great oratory presented on the Lyceum stage, ordinary people would decide on the qualities of character that would define them as “Americans,” and how they would confront the demons facing their new nation, particularly the demon of slavery. Lyceum oratory shows us American values at the moment they crystallize.

We explore two dominant themes as they were addressed on the Lyceum stage. The first theme we broadly define as the philosophy of liberal individualism, optimism, and opportunity, or, as it was called during the time, “uplift.” We hear and read the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Edward Everett as they sketched a vision of America as a millennial nation, but one that would require these new Americans to hew to uniquely American values and traditions. We debate the case that the idealism of early American oratory would provide the philosophical grounding for the great challenge of this age: the abolition of slavery. We then turn to this theme, the antislavery movement, and through the oratory of Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Anna Dickinson, Wendell Phillips, and others, we hear what Americans of the day heard, feel what they felt, and come to understand how they faced the most personal moral challenge of their time.

We study these primary texts in three ways. First, we see them as documents of their day: snapshots of public consensus building. Secondly, we see them as rhetorical texts, as strategic uses of language intended to persuade audiences about the meaning of America and the challenges it would face to realize its full promise. Thirdly, we see these great orations as historical documents, speaking to us today about a time that presages our own. And we engage with the great oratory of the day at actual Lyceum sites where we immerse ourselves in the moment and enrich our learning through context.

Our itinerary takes us to landmark Lyceum sites. The first Lyceum program was presented in Millbury, Massachusetts in 1828. We will return to Millbury, to the Asa Waters mansion, site of early Lyceum gatherings, to hear a lecture on the history of the Lyceum movement and a lecture on the oratory of the Lyceum. We will then visit perhaps the most important Lyceum site, Concord, Massachusetts, for lectures and interpretations of orations by Emerson, Thoreau, and Phillips at the Concord Lyceum, which met at the Masonic Temple Lodge and the First Parish Unitarian Church, and for study and research at the Concord Library and the Concord Museum. Our third Lyceum site will be Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts. At this site, we will hear about the women of the Lyceum and about the women who sought other public speaking lecture circuits because they were banned from early Lyceum forums. Listening to professional interpreters presenting orations by these first female circuit orators and discussing their impact on American culture then and now will be an enriching and unforgettable experience. We then return to Boston to hear Frederick Douglass speak and to discuss his fiery oratorical style. And we spend an afternoon with Edward Everett, the “Cicero of America,” as he was called. We hear him deliver perhaps his most illustrious Lyceum oration, “The Character of Washington,” and we come to understand the power of biography as it was used for rhetorical purposes on the Lyceum stage. We learn about the strategies used by these orators, and we discuss how they “discovered the available means of persuasion,” as Aristotle so famously defined the art of rhetoric. An exact and comprehensive itinerary may be viewed on our website, www.americanlyceum.neu.edu.

These Workshops will speak to the interests of Professors of History, English, Philosophy, Rhetoric, American Studies, African-American Studies, Sociology, or any faculty member or staff person interested in American intellectual and cultural history. Librarians, for instance, are welcome to attend. No other qualifications are necessary other than that you must hold a full-time or adjunct position at a community college.

Joining us on this journey will be a group of distinguished teachers and scholars, including,

Dr. Robert Gross, eminent American historian; prolific essayist on Emerson, Thoreau, and Transcendentalism; expert on Concord, which he has explored in the Bancroft Prize-winning The Minutemen and Their World and in The Transcendentalists and Their World.
Dean Frederick Antczak, award-winning rhetorician, distinguished scholar of political communication, and author of Thought and Character: The Rhetoric of Democratic Education.
Dr. Robert Hall, Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Northeastern University, a frequent contributor to PBS documentaries on the life of slaves in the south and co-editor of the book, Making a Living: The Work Experience of African Americans in New England From Colonial Times to 1945.
Dr. Anne Mattina, scholar of rhetorical studies and author of a number of essays on the emergence of women’s public voice, including, “I Am as a Bell That Cannot Ring: Resources for the Study of Antebellum Women’s Rhetoric,”
Dr. Richard A. Katula, Professor of Communication Studies and Education with a background in classical and contemporary rhetoric. In 2000, I wrote and produced an award-winning documentary on the Gettysburg Address, and my most recent book is, A Synoptic History of Classical Rhetoric.

For a full list of all scholars and interpreters, see our website.

Through their insights, the insights of other invited scholars, and the contributions participants will bring to our discussions, we will make sense of the American Lyceum. To heighten our experience, notable professional interpreters such as Richard Smith, Wendell Refior, Jim Cooke, Judith Black, Lani Peterson, and Susan Lenoe will bring these texts to life with their dramatic interpretations. The American Lyceum Workshop promises to be a lively exchange of ideas.

And to help you become an integral part of the program, an extensive bibliography will be available on our website. Northeastern University will make available its extensive library collection, as will the Concord Library, the Concord Museum, and the American Antiquarian Society. In addition to participating in discussions about the ideas presented through the orations, each one of you will be a part of a group that will present an oral report on the last day of the Workshop on a theme associated with the American Lyceum. Possible report topics could include Lyceum and the Emergence of Women’s Public Voice, Lyceum and the Problem of Sustaining a Public and Moral Consensus in the Service of Civic Education in the 19th Century, Henry David Thoreau, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass: Transformations of the Lyceum Movement, The American Lyceum Movement and the Biography Lecture: Its formation and Its Impact on American Life in the 19th Century, Lyceum and the Diffusion of Practical Knowledge: The Successes and Failures of Adult Education in the 19th Century. Reports may also be given that expand on the historic and/or archival sites visited.

In addition, each one of you will begin work on a research essay or a curriculum plan during the Workshop on a subject of interest; for example, on one of the great public lecturers of the day, looking at these great figures from both a historical and rhetorical point of view. The goal of the reports and written work is to help you take something memorable and substantive from the Workshop to your classroom.

Our host institution, Northeastern University, is located in the heart of Boston. You can learn about Northeastern University by visiting its website: www.neu.edu. Northeastern University is a U.S. News and World Report “top-tier” university with a beautiful urban campus and modern housing in clean, convenient, air-conditioned, award-winning dormitories. You may choose housing in a suite with another participant for approximately $65 per night. Each one of you will have your own private bedroom, and each suite will have a bathroom, kitchen, and a living room. Or, you may choose to have your own suite for $130 per night. To take a full virtual tour of Northeastern University housing go to www.summerhousing.neu.edu. We will most likely be staying in Davenport Commons. Of course, you have the option of staying at one of the hotels in the area, an option you reserve on your own.

Northeastern has a modern student center with a complete food court, and the area around campus offers a full variety of restaurants. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are also served buffet style at the University’s commissary on campus. Meals are reasonably priced and as of this writing cost $8 for breakfast, $10 for lunch, and $12 for dinner. Of course, on days when we are at the historic sites, food will also be available in a number of venues. As noted on the agenda, at three of the sites, we will offer box lunches for a modest price of approximately $8 to $10.

You will enjoy Northeastern University's park-like atmosphere, its gardens and memorials, and for a modest guest fee its state-of-the-art exercise facilities that include swimming, recreational sports, and exercise and weight rooms. Visitors to Northeastern appreciate its location directly across the street from the Museum of Fine Arts and near the scenic Back Bay area of this historic city. Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, is also within walking distance of the campus. The Northeastern library, constructed in 1990, has a state-of-the-art InfoCommons computer center, and there is wireless connectivity in many of the buildings on campus. You may also have internet access from your suite for an additional charge of $50 per person. Northeastern has computer kiosks in convenient locations around campus that allow you to check email and access the Internet. Northeastern is the perfect location for this Workshop.

Finally, thanks to generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, each participant will receive a $500 stipend to help cover expenses upon completion of the workshop. Travel stipends are also available to accepted participants, and these may defray some or all of the cost associated with the trip to Boston.

So I invite you to join us in this intellectual journey back to the 19th century, to relive that time in history when America was truly an "oratorical culture."� Should you want to read about the American Lyceum movement prior to applying, allow me to suggest three books from the many popular and scholarly writings available on the Lyceum:

Antczak, Frederick. Thought and Character: the Rhetoric of Democratic Education. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1985.
Bode, Carl. The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1956.
Ray, Angela. The Lyceum and Public Culture Making. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2005

For more advanced reading, go to our website, www.americanlyceum.neu.edu where you will find an extensive bibliography. Many of these readings will be made available to participants in a binder that will be given to you at the Workshop.

Applying for this Workshop is simple. Begin the process by reading Detailed and easy-to-follow instructions for applying and then complete an online Cover Sheet at http://www.neh.gov/online/education/participants/

Perhaps the most important part of the completed application is an essay of one or two double spaced pages that indicates your background and interest in the American Lyceum, your special perspectives, skills, or experiences that will contribute to the Workshop, and the ways in which this Workshop will enhance your teaching and/or research. The application will also require one letter of recommendation from a department or division chair, or from a colleague or advisor who knows your interests and abilities. Applications must be postmarked by March 15, 2007. A complete application procedure is available on our website by clicking on the Application link. I invite you to visit our website, www.americanlyceum.neu.edu to learn more about this program. You may also contact me personally at R.Katula@neu.edu.

Sincerely yours,

Richard A. Katula, Director
The American Lyceum: