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.
