Chapter 1: Contextualizing John Lawson Stoddard
Chapter 2: Examining Portraiture and Identity
Chapter 3: Framing the Public Image of John Stoddard: The
Illustrated Lectures
Chapter 4: De-Constructing the Public Image of John Stoddard:
Chapter 5: Engaging the Public, Engaging the Self
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 culture steeped with images of a world
becoming more and more visible through photographic images (think
magic lantern slides projected in lectures and the new mechanically
reproduced photographs printed in books). Stoddard utilized the
vistas of landscape, ethnographic photographs of people from
faraway places, and his own photographic image to convey a view of
the world. Cox’s book reminds us of the desire felt by many
Americans during this time to obtain a degree of cultured knowledge
through the hybrid form of the popular and educational
photographically illustrated lecture.
*Melissa Johnson, Illinois State University*
Michaelene Cox brings together the literary and visual cultures of
nineteenth-century travel beautifully in this study of John L.
Stoddard. Cox’s examination of power and photography in relation to
Stoddard’s travels makes an important contribution to such diverse
fields as visual culture, American studies, transnational studies,
and cultural and political history. The emphasis on
self-portraiture in Stoddard’s work is especially timely and
topical, as is the consideration of the lecture as a form of
popular, democratic education.
*Brian Yothers, University of Texas at El Paso*
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