The Politics and Art of John L. Stoddard: Reframing Authority, Otherness, and Authenticity [Hardcover]

This book is a historical and critical assessment of contributions by American writer and lecturer John Lawson Stoddard (1850-1931). It is the first scholarly effort to provide visual and literary analyses of his illustrated travel works and political writings. It claims that Stoddard was a principle engine behind movements toward transforming tourism into a growing consumer culture, democratizing liberal arts education, and fueling anti-WWI campaigns. By the late 1870s, John Lawson Stoddard had played a major role in transforming the aristocratic Grand Tour into a mass cultural phenomenon. His photographs and accompanying public lectures on distant places and peoples caught the attention of decision makers in the U.S. government, but perhaps more importantly, his images and text were imprinted in the minds of millions of audience members. This book suggests how critical approaches borrowed from the interdisciplinary literature of visual culture are helpful in assessing the imagery and identity of a nineteenth-century American travel lecturer and author. It uncovers buried aspects of the personal and public life of Stoddard, and reveals his significant contributions to American political and social history.Michaelene Cox is associate professor of politics and government at Illinois State University.

Michaelene Cox has written a highly detailed account of John Stoddard, the prince of lecturers of nineteenth-century American travel writers. Stoddard, whose work stands alongside that of his contemporaries: American travel writers Bayard Taylor and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), is mostly forgotten to us today, but his travel lectures, fashioned after the style of the Lyceum lecture, and his published travel writings, demonstrate much about nineteenth-century U.S. culture. Stoddard, an entrepreneur, an inventor, and an elite adventurer, did much to demonstrate how late nineteenth-century visual culture in the United States transitioned into modernity and to a culturl“B