Out-of-Class Project: American Teachers' Summertime Activities, 1880s–1930s

In March 1887, Eva Moll wrote about the previous summer in her diary: “The season was fall of rich things of course. Heard some fine violin and harp playing by two Italians. I never expect to hear ‘Nearer my God to Thee’ sweeter on this earth, than it was played by the violinist. We first went to Niagara, visiting all the points.” Moll was not a wealthy person of leisure. She was a single Kansas schoolteacher in her late twenties who struggled to make ends meet, and yet had spent nine weeks at the quintessentially middle-class Chautauqua Institution in western New York State. A slice of my larger investigation of the history of teachers' “summers off,” this essay will explore the social-class dimensions of their summertime activities during a distinctive period for both the middle class and the teaching force in the United States, the decades of the 1880s through the 1930s.

The Seventh Annual Chautauqua Declaration

From August 25 to 27, 2013, the Seventh Annual International Humanitarian Law Dialogs were held at the Chautauqua Institution in Lake Chautauqua, New York. Primarily organized by the Robert H. Jackson Center and cosponsored by other institutions and organizations including the American Society of International Law, the Dialogs bring together international criminal prosecutors, practitioners of international justice, scholars, NGO leaders, human rights activists, students, and members of the public to discuss pressing issues of international peace and justice.

The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance

Charlotte Canning's The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance bemoans the confusion that still persists in distinguishing the Chautauqua Institution founded in upstate New York in 1874 from Circuit Chautauqua, which existed from 1904 into the Great Depression and toured rural America each summer under the readily identified brown tent (a deliberate contrast to the white top of the circus, which Chautauqua condemned). Canning states that “one is hard-pressed to find significant numbers of people who have ever heard of Circuit Chautauqua…. It does not seem to have entered into the American mythos” (2).

Lakeside at Chautauqua's Holy Land

The Chautauqua Institution, founded in 1874 to train American Sunday school teachers, quickly developed programs aimed at encouraging a citizenry refined by Anglo-European, classical high culture and governed by Bible-centered Christian convictions. Avid Bible study, a walk-through model of biblical Palestine, smaller scale replicas of Jerusalem and the biblical Tabernacle, lectures and community rituals, costumed ‘Orientals’ enacting scenes of biblical life—these activities were central to Chautauqua's early identity. This essay explores how Chautauqua's realization of holy land in America embodied particular notions of the Bible, religious experience, cultural values, and ideologies of religion and national selfhood.