Abstract
This multidisciplinary dissertation progresses on several levels. The first cause is to examine the brief history of the Chautauqua Lake Camp Meeting (1871-1875), a religious organization preceding the Chautauqua Institution at its site on Chautauqua Lake in western New York, and trace its organizational and social transition from a Methodist Episcopal camp meeting into the world famous “American Institution.” To accomplish this the Chautauqua Lake Camp Meeting is situated in its historical, regional, and national context in the 1870s, before narrowing the survey to the more immediate social milieu of Chautauqua County, New York, in that era. The contextualization will specifically consider the Chautauqua region’s relationship with the nearby oil-producing district of Pennsylvania, which is revealed to be both a social foil and an economic resource that enabled the development of religious and social tourism on Chautauqua Lake.
A second level of contextualization will consider the evolution of the individual and group performance of evangelical Protestant religiosity across the nineteenth century, from the spectacular behaviors seen at early camp meetings in the trans-Appalachian American Southeast to the more refined behaviors at great holiness meetings in the North to the discrete performances that characterized behaviors within the Chautauqua Move¬ment.
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