What was Chautauqua? Theodore Roosevelt called it "the most American thing in America," Woodrow Wilson described it during World War I as an "integral part of the national defense," and William Jennings Bryan deemed it a "potent human factor in molding the mind of the nation." Conversely, Sinclair Lewis derided it as "nothing but wind and chaff and...the laughter of yokels," William James found it "depressing from its mediocrity," and critic Gregory Mason dismissed it as "infinitely easier than trying to think." However Chautauqua was characterized, it elicited strong reactions and emotions. Founded in 1874 by businessman Lewis Miller and Methodist minister, later Bishop, John Heyl Vincent, Chautauqua's initial incarnation was in western New York state on Lake Chautauqua. The programming first focused on training Sunday school teachers but quickly expanded its range and was the first to offer correspondence degrees in the United States. This summer camp for families that promised "education and uplift" was too popular not to be copied and in less than a decade independent Chautauquas, often called assemblies, sprang up across the country beside lakes and in groves of trees. As with the early lyceum movements and Chautauqua assemblies, the goal of the Circuit Chautauquas was to offer challenging, informational, and inspirational stimulation to rural and small-town America. Once the Circuits were established there was nothing during their heyday that evoked the excitement and promise of summer more than the coming of the brown tent. One manager remembered them as "the essence of an Americanism in days gone by." The Great Depression brought an end to most Circuits, although a few continued until World War II. Their arrival brought people together to improve their minds and renew their ties to one another. As a sort of diverting, wholesome, and morally respectable vaudeville the Circuit Chautauqua was an early form of mass culture. Despite the criticisms leveled by Sinclair Lewis and others, for many the Circuit Chautauqua was a welcome sight providing entertainment and enlightenment. As one spectator concluded, "[our] town was never the same after Chautauqua started coming.... It broadened our lives in many ways." Charlotte Canning
http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/traveling-culture/essay.htm

Chautauqua today--see the 2012 schedule at: http://www.ciweb.org/

Quotes
You make 'em, I amuse 'em. (statement about children)
Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age.
You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.
Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904–1991), better known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss
More quotes at: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss

Going live on January 1, 2012, Project MUSE book collections will feature over 14,000 electronic titles from 66 respected university press and scholarly publishers. The collections will provide libraries, researchers, and students access to a wealth of high quality book-length scholarship, including both new and classic titles, fully integrated with the over 500 journal titles in MUSE's electronic journal collections. http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/65215
"Gunga Din" (1892), a poem by Rudyard Kipling, from the point of view of a British soldier, about a native water-bearer (a "Bhishti") who saves the soldier's life but dies himself. The poem was published as one of the set of martial poems called the Barrack-Room Ballads. The poem inspired a 1939 adventure film of the same name from RKO Radio Pictures starring Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joan Fontaine, and Sam Jaffe in the title role. The movie was remade in 1961 as Sergeants 3, starring the Rat Pack. The locale was moved from British-colonial India to the old West. The Gunga Din character was played in this film by Sammy Davis, Jr. A much shorter animated version of the poem and film was made as an episode of The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo, with the ultra-myopic character in the title role. He was voiced by Jim Backus. In 1962, Sonny Gianotta recorded a novelty song "The Last Blast Of The Blasted Bugler" based on Gunga Din. In 1966, Jim Croce adapted the poem into a song for his album Facets. Find link to the poem at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunga_Din

Gung Ho, unofficial motto of the US Marine Corps, is an abbreviation for the Mandarin Gongye Hezhoushe, or industrial cooperative. The term was used in China, starting in 1938, to refer to small, industrial operations that were being established in rural China to replace the industrial centers that had been captured by the Japanese. The phrase was clipped to the initial characters of the two words, gung ho (or gung he, as it would be transliterated today), which means "work together." http://www.chinapage.com/word/gungho.html

Two Pennsylvania men have been charged with cutting up a steel bridge and selling it for scrap. How - and why - did they do it? When the two men showed up at the scrap yard with chopped-up steel beams and grating, nothing seemed initially suspicious. After all, it is not unusual for men to show up with hundreds of pounds of metal in the back of a pick-up truck, an employee of the yard tells the BBC. But the following month, police determined the men had stolen the steel from a bridge in an isolated wood in rural Pennsylvania, and people familiar with the scrap metal business and theft cases say it may be the first reported case of a bridge being cut down, stolen and sold for scrap. With scrap metal prices at or near historic highs, police across the country and people in the scrap metal recycling business say the US is suffering what is almost an epidemic of metal theft. The case in New Castle, Pennsylvania, a small town about 50 miles (80.5km) north-east of Pittsburgh, unfolded earlier this month when staff at the New Castle Development Corporation, noticed an entire steel bridge had been removed from a wood, where it spanned a creek on an access road. Remnants of the 40ft (12.2m) long and 15ft (4.57m) wide bridge indicated it had been sheared from its moorings with a blow torch, say police. According to police and an employee of the scrap yard, the thieves cut the pieces into three-foot sections and hauled them out of the woods in a pick-up truck. Investigators with the Pennsylvania State Police put the word out, and two days later, employees at a nearby industrial metal recycling yard, Ferrotech Corporation, reported they had bought 31,000lbs (14 tons) of steel matching the missing bridge for $5,179 (£3,287), in several transactions in September. No national agency keeps definitive statistics on scrap metal theft, but the Institute for Recycling Industries says reports of thefts to its online tracking service were up 94% in 2010 from the year before. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15344442

When the National Book Foundation announced its nominees last week for the Young People’s Literature category of the National Book Awards, they accidentally picked a book called Shine when they really meant to pick one called Chime. Instead of honoring Franny Billingsley’s young adult novel about a teenage witch, they found themselves praising Lauren Myracle’s young adult novel about a teenage sleuth who investigates a hate crime. Billingsley’s Chime was belatedly nominated and Myracle announced that she had been asked drop out of the awards. At least one good thing came out of the mix-up: because Shine deals with a gay-related hate crime, Myracle asked the Foundation to donate $5,000 to the Matthew Shepherd Foundation, which advocates acceptance of gay youths. Had she remained a finalist, Myracle would have received $1,000, a medal, and a “citation” from the jury. The winners of the National Book Awards will be announced at a ceremony in New York on Nov. 16. http://entertainment.time.com/2011/10/18/shine-not-chime-the-national-book-awards-gets-it-wrong/