Taking the Town: Collegiate and Community Culture in the Bluegrass, 1880-1917

Foreword

Foreword Lexington, Kentucky, was a much smaller place a century ago (the population was only 26,000 in 1900), the proportion of African Americans was larger (39 percent), and the color line ran deep. But more to the point, the landscape of learning was profoundly different from our own, and not just because the revolutionary impact of new information technologies and the modern movement for civil rights were still a long way off. For most people in the 1880s or 1890s—whether they were rich or poor, white or black, male or female—the prolonged school career that would become the norm among generations born after World War II was all but unimaginable. That is not to say that educational opportunity was limited, but only that it was enmeshed in older meanings and different social purposes. As Thomas Bender, Joseph Kett, Louise Stevenson, and others have suggested , the classroom was but one scene of instruction among many in the nineteenth century, and not the most important scene at that.1 Of course, the public school movement was already gathering momentum in certain quarters, the same public school movement that would eventually erect a curricular ladder extending from kindergarten to graduate school and help create the entrenched social imperatives that required every child to climb it. But the horizon of educational interest among the middle classes was still broad enough to include the sites and occasions that the nation’s cities and towns had to offer. Museums, parks, fairs and expositions, lyceum lectures, libraries, and theaters continued to hold an honored place alongside schools and colleges. And on a more intimate scale, serious reading, journal keeping , correspondence, and conversation were cultivated daily in a spirit that is difficult for us to appreciate today. Whether in the parlor or in literary societies , reading clubs, or church groups, an alert commitment to edification and mutual self-improvement helped set the tone for relationships among family, friends, and associates alike. Inspired by the work of Bender, Kett, and Stevenson, Kolan Morelock evokes the dynamic, reciprocal relationships that linked campus and community together as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. He describes in detail the last hurrah of a pervasive rhetorical culture, a world in which the competitive performances of student orators mattered most to audiences of townsfolk and fellow students alike. And when the literary societies began to fade into obscurity, as they did by the turn of the century , he shows how student dramatic clubs assumed their place, reflecting the dawning priorities and interests of a new “culture of professionalism.” Imaginatively conceived and meticulously researched, Taking the Town is local history at its best. By refusing to reduce the history of education to the history of schooling—by refusing to treat the past as a simple prelude to the present—Morelock points the way toward a vast and still largely unexplored region of issues in the experience of the commonwealth of Kentucky and its people. It will be interesting to see who follows him in this effort, and how they will manage to do so. Richard Angelo Series Editor Note 1. See Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Joseph Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); Louise Stevenson, The Victorian Home Front: American Thought and Culture, 1860–1880 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); Richard Lyman Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1993); Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and the Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). x  Foreword ...