Frederick Douglass on the Lyceum Circuit: Social Assimilation, Social Transformation?

By adapting dominant tenets of the mid-nineteenth-century United States—such as the "common sense" of ordinary people, the value of self-help, and the assumption of American exceptionalism—Frederick Douglass, as a lyceum celebrity, produced a complex rhetoric that promoted reformist ideals to a mass audience. This essay examines the possibilities and limitations of assimilationist discourse proffered for transformational ends.