During its first eighty years, more famous men and women, including American presidents, appeared under the auspices of the Chautauqua Institution, located on the shore of Lake Chautauqua in an obscure part of northwestern New York, than at any other place in the country. Built in 1874, Chautauqua was headquarters for a phenomenally successful late nineteenth-century religious and mass education movement that satisfied a deep hunger throughout America for culture and "innocent entertainment" at reduced prices.

Philosopher William James visited the site in 1899 and was astonished by the degree to which its small-town values informed nationwide programs. The institution reflected the inexhaustible energies and interests of two founders, Lewis Miller, a wealthy Akron, Ohio, manufacturer of farm machinery (and Thomas A. Edison's future father-in-law), and John Heyl Vincent, who at eighteen had been licensed in Pennsylvania as a Methodist "exhorter and preacher." Both had grown...