The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance

Abstract

Charlotte Canning's The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance bemoans the confusion that still persists in distinguishing the Chautauqua Institution founded in upstate New York in 1874 from Circuit Chautauqua, which existed from 1904 into the Great Depression and toured rural America each summer under the readily identified brown tent (a deliberate contrast to the white top of the circus, which Chautauqua condemned). Canning states that “one is hard-pressed to find significant numbers of people who have ever heard of Circuit Chautauqua…. It does not seem to have entered into the American mythos” (2).