| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Angela G. Ray. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005. xii, 371 pp. Cloth, $79.95, ISBN 0-87013-745-X. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-87013-744-1.)

Although the topic is often maligned as epiphenomenal or insignificant, historians and scholars in allied disciplines have begun rediscovering the centrality of oral performance(s) in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America (for example, Kenneth Cmiel in Democratic Eloquence, 1990, and Sandra M. Gustafson in Eloquence Is Power, 2000). Given its longevity and cultural significance, it is surprising that the platform oratory and other modes of oral interaction that collectively constituted the American lyceum tradition have not (with the exception of Donald Scott's work) received much recent scholarly attention. Angela G. Ray's The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States, the first book-length study of the subject in roughly fifty years, corrects this trend by recuperating the lyceum's "culture-making" (p. 6) capacity.

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