Lyceums

Lyceums, popular societies for literary and scientific education. The first “American Lyceum” was founded at Millbury, Mass. (1826), by Josiah Holbrook, and under his leadership nearly 100 branches were established during the next two years, embodying his program of providing educational opportunities for adults, stimulating teacher‐training and interest in schools, and founding museums and libraries. At first chiefly concerned with the cooperative study of natural history, the lyceums extended their curricula to include a wide range of subjects, and eight years after Holbrook began the work, approximately 3000 lyceums had been founded in towns and cities throughout the U.S., providing the most important stimulus to general education up to that time. In 1839 the American Lyceum Union held a national convention, and lesser organizations were already established in states and cities, of which the most notable was the Boston lyceum, with Daniel Webster as president. The movement flourished until the end of the century, interrupted only by the Civil War, and local programs of reading, debates, and classes were amplified by the addresses of professional lecturers. Among the popular and well‐paid lyceum speakers were Emerson, whose essays were often first presented as lyceum lectures, Webster, Thoreau, Parker, Holmes, Hale, H.W. Beecher, Agassiz, Lowell, Curtis, C.A. Dana, Bayard Taylor, Clemens, Barnum, and Henry M. Stanley. Reform movements were stimulated by such lecturers as Garrison, Greeley, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Stanton. With the rise of mercantile libraries and systems of public schools and higher education institutions, for which the lyceum movement had been largely responsible, local groups assumed the nature of forums that were supplied with lecturers from central booking offices, such as the American Literary Bureau of New York, and the Boston Lyceum Bureau of Redpath. After 1890, Chautauqua societies took the place of the original lyceums, which became centers of popular entertainment.