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Frederick Douglass on the Lyceum Circuit: Social Assimilation, Social Transformation?
- Rhetoric & Public Affairs
- Michigan State University Press
- Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 2002
- pp. 625-647
- 10.1353/rap.2003.0014
- Article
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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.