| 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 Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance. By Charlotte M. Canning. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005. xvi, 268 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-87745-941-X.)
Once upon a time, academics were very familiar with the Chautauqua Institution. This scheme for popular education, founded by Methodists in 1874, was embraced in the 1890s by public-minded professors who used Chautauqua's reading circles and summer assemblies to spread the gospel of urban reform. Progressive academics, it seemed, had found their bridge to the middle classes.	1
But then came a younger generation of scholars. To them, elevating the profession and getting tenure were paramount concerns, and Chautauqua seemed like a waste of time. Worse, bohemians such as Sinclair Lewis ridiculed the hokey commercialism that had crept onto the institution's stage by the 1920s. For eighty years, not one book-length scholarly critique of Chautauqua was published by a major university press. The movement seemed to have been forgotten.	2
Suddenly, Chautauqua is back on the scholarly radar. Two books have appeared in quick succession: my The Chautauqua Moment (2003), which addressed its origins and evolution, and a wonderful new book on the movement's latter phases by theater historian Charlotte M. Canning. Chautauqua's past has rarely received such exhaustive and critical attention.	. . .

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