The Cosmopolitan Lyceum
The Cosmopolitan Lyceum

Author: Tom F. Wright

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781625340597

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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 week regularly attended talks in local venues, captivated by the words of visiting orators who spoke on an extensive range of topics. The movement was a major intellectual and cultural force of this nation-building period, forming the creative environment of writers and public figures such as Frederic Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Anna Dickinson, and Mark Twain. The phenomenon of the lyceum has commonly been characterized as inward looking and nationalistic. Yet as this collection of essays reveals, nineteenth-century audiences were fascinated by information from around the globe, and lecturers frequently spoke to their fellow Americans of their connection to the world beyond the nation and helped them understand exotic ways of life. Never simple in its engagement with cosmopolitan ideas, the lyceum provided a powerful public encounter with international currents and crosscurrents, foreshadowing the problems and paradoxes that continue to resonate in our globalized world. This book offers a major reassessment of this important cultural phenomenon, bringing together diverse scholars from history, rhetoric, and literary studies. The twelve essays use a range of approaches, cover a wide chronological timespan, and discuss a variety of performers both famous and obscure. In addition to the volume editor, contributors include Robert Arbour, Thomas Augst, Susan Branson, Virginia Garnett, Peter Gibian, Sara Lampert, Angela Ray, Evan Roberts, Paul Stob, Mary Zboray, and Ronald Zboray.

Hollywood Highbrow
Hollywood Highbrow

Author: Shyon Baumann

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0691187282

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Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves. The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art.

Love Them in
Love Them in

Author: Stanley N. Gundry

Publisher: Moody Publishers

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780802490575

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In this book, Dr. Gundry brings D.L. Moody clearly into focus, and he allows him to speak for himself throughout the pages. He also moves to the heart of Moody's theology-his understanding of the Gospel and how it is received. Written in a fast-paced and clear style, here is a fascinating historical and theological study of one of the key figures from the tradition of American revivalism.