Chapter Six explains how Rogers contributed greatly to a media revolution that reshaped American culture in the early 1900s. Beginning in 1922, he reached a vast new popular audience by becoming a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist (first with a weekly column, then a shorter daily one), writing regulary for magazines, making advertisements, cutting phonograph records, and making sporadic appearances in the new medium of radio. He also updated the old tradition of the lecture,regularly traveling throughout the nation to appear before audiences in town halls, lyceums, and churches. Throughout, Rogers deployed his talents as a cracker-barrel philosopher and down-home wit to interrogate America’s move to embrace a new consumer, urban, leisure-oriented culture.

This chapter concerns itself with the Sophists’ professional activities. Their professionalism – especially the claim that they were first to teach for pay – has often been used as the only meaningful characteristic to distinguish them from other wisdom experts. When reviewing the evidence for their professional activities, however, a different picture emerges, one in which the Sophists appear to be less exceptional and more embedded in a broader economy of wisdom than has hitherto been realized. The chapter reviews the primary sources and discusses the difficulty of reconstructing the Sophists’ professional lives based on authors who, like Plato, seem hostile and frequently mention the Sophists in invective contexts. By paying attention to the Sophists’ professional activities, we can gain a better understanding of their social position and the cultural legitimacy accorded them by their contemporaries. How we interpret their professional activities can further help shape our understanding of their contribution to Greek philosophy and their intellectual legacy.

This chapter summarises the Laudian critique of the main forms of puritan voluntary religion; forms which the Laudians regarded as subversive of the public rites and ordinances of the national church and the unity of the Christian community. The practices involved were the puritan cult of the sermon, and obsession with preaching, extempore preaching and prayer; sermon-gadding, the maintenance of lectureships and the keeping of conventicles, all of which were taken to be subversive of the public religious observances and the Christian community mandated and sustained by the national church. Indeed, they were regarded as being tantamount to separation.

Having explored the extensive amount of high-profile, large-scale theatrical activity at Bournville that took place before the factory’s first dramatic society was established in 1912, Chapter 5’s focus is the emergence of this group, its key players, and the connections between the society, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and the city’s wider cultural networks. Cadbury’s first recreational theatrical society proved a useful resource for the firm, and its repertoire, personnel, wartime activity, and programmed appearances at Bournville functions are explored alongside the challenges faced by leaders and members.

Within a tidal wave of dispossession, Indigenous performers forged livings in scientific showmanship. In 1850, ‘Jemmy’, an Aboriginal boy, starred in a Melbourne lecture series that fused phrenology with mesmerism. During the mid 1860s, Tamati Hapimana Te Wharehinaki, chief of the Ngati Ruangutu hapū of the Tapuika Iwi, toured through the Australian colonies with the infamous Thomas Guthrie Carr. Supposedly mesmerised by the lecturers, these performers demonstrated actions that corresponded with particular phrenological organs, wrapping feigned subordination in displays of cultural difference that fascinated Europeans. An ethnographic history approach to these lecture reports reveals how these performers cannily shaped these representations for personal gain. Although serving colonial fantasies of control, the stage world nevertheless allowed them to push against the constraints that bound their daily lives. The fragile relations of power that made or broke a show enabled tactical choices for fleeting material or social benefit.

The second half of the nineteenth century was a golden age of lecturing and speeches, and Mark Twain established himself as one of the most popular lecturers and speakers of his time. Throughout the country, there was a wide network of speakers on religion, culture, social issues, literature, and the arts. Twain first gave lectures in the late 1860s, and he returned to the lecture circuit when he needed money or when he was touting a new book, as he did in his 1884-85 lecture tour with George Washington Cable, which covered the Northeast and Midwest for over four months and thousands of miles. When he declared bankruptcy in the 1890s, his around-the-world lecture tour allowed him to pay off his debts in full, as well as to further spread his international reputation. He had a command of the stage and the audience that was gripping, eliciting riotous laughter, but also making people think about his comic but often acerbic comments on a variety of subjects.

Amanda Golden addresses Plath’s pedagogical strategies in order to shed new light on the ways that her identities as a student, teacher, and poet overlap. Focusing on her teaching of modernism, including the work of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Henry James, Golden shows how Plath’s later writing refashions the language she used as a teacher. Golden draws heavily on the teaching notes Plath made whilst working in the English Department at Smith College, combing through Plath’s lists, lectures, and the passages from critical texts that she highlighted.