Remapping the historical terrain of popular learning in the U.S., Angela G. Ray and Paul Stob’s edited collection Thinking Together guides readers to attend more sensitively to the social complexity and diversity of platform culture during the long nineteenth century. In this volume, platform culture names the then-available modes of public performance and lecture, which supplied a variety of vehicles for “thinking together” – the editors’ term for “people assembling to pursue knowledge and to forge collective understanding” (Ray and Stob 2018, 1). Readers of this text will encounter the “platform” as a protean space for rhetorically (re)configuring identity and community, especially along the axes of religion, race, class, gender, and nationality. In this respect, the collection is notable for convening chapters that recover the narratives of minoritized rhetors, offering a richer historical portrait of “how people living on the margins of society managed to think together despite the many obstacles they faced” (2).Collectively and kaleidoscopically, the chapters of Thinking Together revise the record of how public rhetoric provided for popular learning during the period, both along and against the grain of social difference. For this reason, the collection would make a worthy addition to the bookshelves of specialists in U.S. rhetorical history and culture – but might be an even better addition to introductory syllabi in rhetorical historiography, offering an accessible survey of platform culture’s diverse manifestations. I particularly recommend this collection to readers seeking to place histories of popular learning in closer conversation with histories of social hierarchy and exclusion. Contributions made by Tom F. Wright (chapter 3) and Kirt H. Wilson and Kaitlyn G. Patia (chapter 4), for instance, examine the complex roles platform rhetorics played in resisting or re-inscribing nineteenth-century race science. To be sure, Thinking Together’s account of social diversity and stratification is partial, leaving much underexamined – including where disability and queer cultures are concerned. Yet this partiality doubles as an invitation for future work and can, in the classroom, be leveraged as a teaching device: “Who is missing? What would recovering them mean and require?”Perhaps surprisingly, this collection also has much to offer scholars of (social) media history and rhetoric. With its focus on the nineteenth century, Thinking Together’s explicit engagements with digital rhetorics and environments are understandably infrequent. Yet in excavating past media ecologies that supported “thinking together,” the collection could be considered a sort of rhetorical prehistory for present day social media, positioning readers to ponder continuities between nineteenth-century platform cultures and twenty-first-century social media platforms. Throughout, Thinking Together highlights how oral performances came to be remediated and recirculated in print, serving as sites for public commentary and community-building. Readers seeking to engage in (social) media archeology will be particularly pleased to find the U.S. lyceum reimagined by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray (chapter 2) as a virtual (“portable”) social environment and cultural form, recreated and reenacted in a diversity of spaces, including Civil War prisoner of war camps.Thinking Together does not promise a unified, definitive treatment of the nineteenth-century platform. Instead, it delivers something more important: This polyvocal text stresses the plurality and potency of the long nineteenth century’s popular learning ecologies, and it insists that there remains much to be learned about (and from) the period and its platform cultures. This collection represents one multidisciplinary model for thinking together about this past – and issues a call for future scholars to join this work.