Education | Jane Addams Papers Project

July 17, 2025September 3, 2025

Two Chautauqua Summers

Jane Addams left Illinois for Chautauqua, New York, on Friday, July 4, 1902, at 3 p.m. Traveling on the New York Central Railroad, perhaps in a sleeping car, she had at least one book with her to read, as she always traveled with books. Onboard the train, Addams enjoyed the countryside passing by outside the train windows and engaged in casual conversation with fellow travelers. She may have snacked or had a light meal in the dining car and polished up her series of five lectures she was scheduled to deliver during her week-long stay at the Chautauqua Institution. She arrived in Chautauqua in the wee hours of the morning the following day and checked into the Athenaeum Hotel, a Second-Empire building opened to guests in 1881. The hotel boasted an ornate three-story tower with a mansard roof, centered on the front façade of the hotel. It stuck a magnificent pose from atop a small hill overlooking a deep lawn and Chautauqua Lake, matching in style the long skirts and elaborate hats of the women who strolled on the winding paths below it.

Exactly 123 years after Addams arrived in Chautauqua, I left Illinois for Chautauqua at 7:45 a.m. I drove by myself in my Ford Escape hybrid, stopping overnight in northern Indiana at my mom’s house. I drove the remaining six of the nine-hour journey the next day, snacking on cashews and dried mango while alternately listening to an audio book and rehearsing memorized sections of the one lecture that I was scheduled to deliver during my week-long stay at the Chautauqua Institution. I arrived in Chautauqua in the midafternoon on Sunday, July 6, and checked into the Athenaeum Hotel. Despite its peeling paint and the somewhat ragged appearance of the wicker chairs lined across the inviting two-story porches, the historical charm of the building calmed my road-weary spirit and my nerves, frazzled from sharing the road with semi-tractor trucks oblivious to speed limits. I would not learn it until later, but the stately hotel tower was two-stories shorter than the one that greeted Jane Addams in 1902, the upper stories having been dismantled for safety reasons in the 1920s. Still, in the hazy heat of July in 2025, the hotel was yesteryear grand, nestled as it was among mature trees and rich foliage, the Victorian porches already calling me. I made a vow to enjoy them each day of my visit, to drink coffee and watch every sunrise over the lake and sip cocktails as evening shadows fell over the enchanting, historic village.

In 1902, Jane Addams was not only a featured lecturer for Chautauqua’s “Social Settlement Week,” but she also brought with her the Hull-House Summer School. After ten years at her alma mater in Rockford, Illinois, this year she was hosting the Summer School at Chautauqua Institution. Seventy young women, mostly teachers from Chicago, would reside in various cottages scattered across the Chautauqua campus, participate in a variety of Institution lectures on topics like pedagogy and history and participate in activities like swimming and an excursion to Niagara Falls. The students would also attend Addams’s lectures and then met with her each evening in a shelter by the ravine piazza of the Institution’s auditorium. Addams’s good friend and fellow settlement house leader Graham Taylor from Chicago Commons was also joining her as a member of the Chautauqua faculty that summer.

In 2025, I was at Chautauqua as part of a group assembled by President Lincoln’s Cottage, a historic site in Washington, DC, where Abraham Lincoln and his family lived for one-quarter of his presidency. It is the place where Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and where he and his family grieved the death of eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln in 1862. Our group was leading a Master Class series to provide both historical and modern contexts for the Metropolitan Opera’s Chautauqua workshop of Lincoln in the Bardo, based on the novel of the same name about Willie’s death and his father’s grief. My lecture was part history about the Lincoln family and grief, and it also shared my personal story of grief and illustrated, as well, how my emotional connection to the figures I study informs my understanding of the past.

I was in Chautauqua because of my years as an editor of Abraham Lincoln’s papers, but I went to Chautauqua with Jane Addams in my head. I knew about the long, storied history of the Chautauqua Institution through my work editing Jane Addams’s papers, and I was eager to breathe in the place to which she returned many times during her long career as a reformer, writer, and renowned lecturer.

Chautauqua Institution was founded in 1874 by Episcopal Bishop John Heyl Vincent (1832-1920) and Lewis Miller (1829-1899), a religious leader, educator, and industrialist. The first Chautauqua assemblies were camp meetings for Sunday school teachers (attendees sleeping in actual tents!), but the organization expanded quickly four years later when Vincent established the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC), a correspondence school which offered “courses of reading for all classes of people.” The early popularity of the CLSC and the growth of the Chautauqua Institution in western New York spurred the organization of Chautauqua societies across the country, the Chautauqua Movement promoting the idea of lifelong learning for adults, celebrating the most important work of educators, scientists, artists, writers, political leaders, and reformers, and espousing the idea that an educated public is a healthier public.

In his 1886 book The Chautauqua Movement, Vincent wrote: “Education, once the peculiar privilege of the few, must in our best earthy estate become the valued possession of the many. It is a natural and inalienable right of human souls.”

Jane Addams was a lifelong learner herself, and all of her reform work in Chicago and beyond was rooted in her steadfast belief that education and learning had power to lift up individuals and communities and help create a better world for all people. It is not surprising, then, that she supported the Chautauqua Movement, as did numerous leaders during the Progressive Era.

Jane Addams at Chautauqua in 1915; Bishop Vincent is on the right.

Addams’s trip to Chautauqua for Social Settlement Week in July 1902 was not her first. She previously lectured there in July 1893 as part of another program about social settlements, and she returned in July 1895. In August 1898, she lectured on “Aspects of the Social Problem,” and in August 1900, she was back to deliver four lectures. Jane Addams valued the mission of Chautauqua, speaking at numerous Chautauqua Movement events throughout the Midwest and returning to Chautauqua Institution as a featured lecturer six times between 1903 and 1915. Ill health forced her to turn down an invitation to Chautauqua in 1918, but as she wrote Arthur Bestor, president of Chautauqua Institution, in March of that year: “My plans are of necessity indefinite but as it is always a pleasure to me to speak at [Chautauqua] I shall hope to be able to arrange it this year.”

My cabinet of curiosities. (And, yes, I do believe that Abraham Lincoln would have loved Jane Addams).

Two of Addams’s books were selected as part of the coveted CLSC’s annual reading curriculum: Newer Ideals of Peace in 1907-1908 and Twenty Years at Hull-House in 1911-1912. It is the Chautauqua Edition of Newer Ideals that I have in my Jane Addams cabinet of curiosities. The 2025 CLSC reading list includes one of my favorite books of recent years, Eve by scholar Cat Bohannon as well as Liberation Day, stories by George Saunders. Saunders was the featured lecturer at Chautauqua during the week I was there. He was present at the end of the week for the opera workshop of his brave and human novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Not bragging or anything, but it was a thrill for me to meet Saunders and have him inscribe my personal copy of Lincoln in the Bardo.

George Saunders was the star of my week at Chautauqua, but Jane Addams was always the star when she visited the Chautauqua Institution.

Even in 1915, when her peace work made her unpopular with some audiences, people clamored to read her books and articles, to meet her, and to hear her speak. In a speech at Chautauqua Institution in August that year, just four months after the United States entered the World War, she took the podium to defend herself. As an unwavering peace advocate, she was subject to criticism by many who believed that patriotism required total support of one’s government during wartime. Addams disagreed, believing instead that to be a patriot was to question the government and that free speech in time of war was even more important than in peacetime. In a speech at Carnegie Hall in New York on July 9, during which she had discussed her tour of Europe as part of the work of the International Congress of Women, Addams made some statements about soldiers, the use of stimulants in the European armies, and definitions of bravery that rankled many. However, at Chautauqua she reiterated those statements, reaffirmed the horror faced by men in the trenches, and celebrated the courage of soldiers.

I don’t know how the audience received her lecture, but that the Chautauqua Institution granted Jane Addams a forum to raise her voice of peace during a time of war, speaks to the Institution’s commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas.

I witnessed that commitment to free speech at Chautauqua, as well. In a crowded amphitheater on July 10, at the coveted daily 10:45 a.m. Chautauqua Institution lecture, I watched Deborah Rutter, the widely regarded and long-time director of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, defend her tenure leading the Center. Fired in February by President Trump for cultivating diversity and inclusion in the arts, Rutter spoke to the Chautauqua audience about the importance of creative expression in a democracy. She defended the Center’s mission to bring people of diverse backgrounds to perform on a variety of stages and to bring in audiences across all social, political, racial, ethnic, and economic divides. Her Chautauqua audience interrupted her speech numerous times in rousing applause of her arguments that art is important for art’s sake, that creative expression in dark political times can save us, and that we must support the arts even more strenuously now that some voices are under the threat of being silenced.

Jane Addams would have been every bit as impressed with the speech and the audience as I was.

My week at Chautauqua was inspiring, rewarding, eye-opening, and a little bit magical. It was a modern experience informed by my interest in and emotional connection to the past. I was there in the company of new friends and historical figures, Jane Addams front and center in my mind’s eye during my eight days on the Chautauqua campus. I am one of those history nerds who is always looking to run into ghosts of the past, and on that front my summer week in Chautauqua did not disappoint.

By Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

A “Chautauquapolitan” on one of the glorious porches of the Athenaeum.

Pro Reader Tip: Are you looking for suggestions for your next read? Consider consulting the CLSC Book List, 1878-2024. There is bound to be a perfect book for you to consider. Cheers and happy reading!

Sources: Jonathan David Schmitz and William Flanders, Postcard History Series, Chautauqua Institution (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2011), 13, 52; American National Biography; John H. Vincent, The Chautauqua Movement (Boston: Chautauqua Press, 1886), 2; “Next Season at Chautauqua,” The Buffalo (NY) Review, June 21, 1902, 5; “Chautauqua 1902,” The Chautauquan, 35 (July 1902): 385-411; “Railway Time Tables; Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1902, 15; “Personal Record,” The Daily Journal (Freeport, IL), July 3 1902, 4; “Jane Addams Goes East to Open Summer School,” Chicago Tribune, July 5, 1902, 4; “Chautauqua Is Open,” The Fredonia (NY) Censor, July 9, 1902, 5; “A Fair Chautauqua,” Buffalo (NY) Evening News, July 10, 1902, 1; “Chautauqua’s Success,” Buffalo Evening News, July 13, 1902, 24; “Jane Addams to Be at Chautauqua,” Buffalo Evening Times, Aug. 11, 1915, 5; Hull-House Bulletin, 1 (Dec. 1, 1896): 3; Hull-House Bulletin, 15 (Semi-Annual, 1902, no. 2): 4; Selected Papers of Jane Addams, vol. 3, 320, 437, 654n7; Democracy and Education, August 9, 1900; Jane Addams to Julia Clifford Lathrop, July 13, 1902; Chautauqua Girls to Jane Addams, c. August 1902; Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, August 15, 1903; Work and Play: Recognition Day Address, August 16, 1905; Hull-House Year Book 1906-1907; Macmillan Company to Jane Addams, October 11, 1906; Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, July 10, 1907; Newer Ideals in Education, July 3, 1908; George Platt Brett Sr. to Jane Addams, January 10, 1911; Peace, August 14, 1915; Jane Addams to Arthur Eugene Bestor, March 1, 1918, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

April 14, 2025

Guest Post: Democratic Ensembles: Spoken Art and Politics at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890-1920

By Fiona Maxwell, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Chicago.

Hull-House staffer Nicolette Malone working with actors for a dramatic performance (Hull-House Photograph Collection, University of Illinois Chicago).

In the Chicago settlement house movement, performance and sociability supplied a means and a metaphor for reimagining democracy as a collective project in service of the common welfare. My recently completed PhD dissertation, “Democratic Ensembles: Spoken Art and Politics at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890-1920,” takes self-governing settlement house clubs as a case study for exploring how Progressive Era concepts of social democracy unfolded in everyday practice. The project underscores the role of artistic collaboration in envisioning and bringing about desired political futures, and it introduces a more extensive dramatis personae to the history of Progressive reform.

Although a work of history, “Democratic Ensembles” has its origins not merely in writerly imagination and archival holdings, but in the actor’s craft. I began studying at the Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston, Illinois as a child, working my way through their performance ensembles and eventually joining the teaching staff. The Piven approach to actor training—rooted in theatre games and story theatre adaptation, and defined by values of process, improvisation, and ensemble—descends from the work of Neva Boyd and Viola Spolin at Hull-House during the 1920s and 1930s. While honing my skills as a performer and pedagogue, I kept hearing tantalizing whispers about a fabled prehistory of our approach.

A Neighborhood Party (Hull-House Yearbook Photos, University of Illinois Chicago)

When it came time to write a BA thesis as a History and Theatre major at Northwestern University, my mind immediately gravitated to Hull-House. I determined to learn as much as I could about the working-class Chicagoans who enrolled in settlement house arts education programs to further their educations, find like-minded peers, and exercise their creative imaginations. In this early stage, my research focused on the community reception of children’s dramatics at Hull-House, with the goal of tracing the social and cultural history of early, pre-Spolin theatre education while foregrounding the perspectives of youth participants. I immersed myself in the Hull-House Collection at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as a burgeoning wealth of published and online resources, including the Jane Addams Papers Project. Wading through thousands of documents, I encountered Hull-House’s dauntless cadre of reform-minded residents, as well as countless neighbors determined to realize their individual and collective aspirations. Reluctant to return home from this time travel expedition, I realized that pursuing a PhD was in order.

My early years of graduate school at the University of Chicago coincided with an explosion of public and scholarly discourse on democracy. During the late 2010s and early 2020s, historians began to revisit late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformers and theorists—particularly Jane Addams and John Dewey—with renewed appreciation for their idea that democracy could be strengthened by social interaction across political and cultural divides and by prioritizing group welfare over individual gain. I embarked on my dissertation research paying close attention to how settlement workers articulated their theory of social democracy. I discovered that the language they used to describe their political philosophy mirrored the language that is still in practice today in ensemble-based theatre—conceptual gifts from Progressive Era politics to contemporary artistic practice. Recognizing the broader political significance of the settlement story, I expanded my earlier focus on Hull-House theatre to embrace the “spoken arts”—including storytelling, group games, dramatic reading, oratory, and debate—at settlement houses across Chicago, and I moved from children to “children plus,” examining how young people refined and implemented their artistic and political agendas as they aged and tracking how children’s involvement catalyzed the participation of adult family members. I was lucky enough to discover a surfeit of underutilized materials in settlement club archives. At settlement houses across Chicago, working-class “neighbors” organized self-governing clubs that left plentiful records of their daily activities, in the form of constitutions and meeting minutes, neighborhood news and club gossip, and the occasional script, poem, joke, or lyric.[1] Piecing these fragments together recasts settlement houses, not merely as gathering places for the reform-minded middle and upper classes, but as genuinely grassroots centers of community education and local organizing.

In its current iteration, “Democratic Ensembles” investigates the ways in which settlement volunteers and participants used the spoken arts to bridge social boundaries and develop a collaborative approach to democratic participation. Generations of scholars have explored the ways in which Chicago settlement leaders codified neighborhood service into new academic and professional fields, claimed a role for women in federal policymaking, and contributed to pragmatist philosophy and democratic theory. This dissertation uncovers the full “ensemble cast” of Chicago Progressivism by introducing two previously unexamined settlement constituencies: student volunteers from local universities, who drew on their interdisciplinary training in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to facilitate settlement pedagogy; and, most significantly, the neighborhood families who embraced settlement programming and made it their own. It joins an interdisciplinary scholarly conversation concerning how political, social, and artistic speaking genres have generated theories and practices of democracy, and it applies analytical frameworks drawn from book history, rhetoric, and theatre and performance studies. Combining archival research, interdisciplinary methods, and process-oriented theatre pedagogy, this project constructs a social and political history of spoken arts education, which adds to scholarly inquiry in urban history, gender history, and the history of childhood and youth and offers an actionable model for current practice. The dissertation tells the story of enfranchisement through cultural experiences and, in doing so, contributes a new conception of the role of the spoken arts in civic life.

The story begins with early settlement house founders diagnosing the lack of communal gathering spaces in industrial Chicago as a threat to the viability of democratic self-governance. The early chapters explore how settlement workers adapted traditional forms of domestic sociability and artistry to create a new piece of social infrastructure that invited equal participation from men, women, and children of all classes and cultural backgrounds. To explain how and why the spoken arts achieved such primacy in settlement programming, I analyze the formative experiences of a key yet previously unexamined subset of volunteer club and class leaders: students and graduates of Northwestern University’s Cumnock School of Oratory, who organized settlement programs with a conviction that through performance and pedagogy, they could speak a more inclusive and collaborative public sphere into being.[2]

The remaining chapters conduct an in-depth analysis of on-the-ground settlement programming, tracking the transition from arts education to political organizing from the perspectives of school-aged children, working young people, and whole families. The ability of working-class, immigrant, and Black schoolgirls and boys to engage in collective deliberation and semi-autonomous artistic production inspired settlement workers to theorize children’s club work as an apprenticeship for civic engagement. Working adolescents and young adults, meanwhile, utilized their skills in persuasive speech and organizational leadership to assert their voices in settlement administration and local reform. Experience with shared governance and extensive training in verbal expression enabled young people to transition from planning parties and staging plays to mobilizing in service of political change.[3] The participation of adult family members solidified the civic influence of the settlement project. When settlements inaugurated all-ages, mixed-gender governing bodies, fathers and sons were compelled to recognize their wives, sisters, and daughters as effective public actors. With the advent of municipal suffrage in 1913, neighborhood families began working to extend the vision of an activist, welfare-oriented local government they had devised in settlement clubs into formal electoral channels.

The idealism that accompanied whole-family politics shattered with the declaration of war in Europe in 1914. Global warfare abroad and racial violence at home exposed the challenges of bringing club ideals and methods into the world beyond settlement doors. “Democratic Ensembles” concludes by identifying postwar trends in settlement work and gesturing towards the subsequent evolution of settlement artistic methodologies, particularly their codification and widespread dissemination by mid-twentieth-century Chicago theatre practitioners and educators. Amidst the continued struggle to bring collaborative values and social consciousness into formal politics, Chicagoans’ persistent commitment to neighborhood arts programs as a force for grassroots change has emerged as one of the most hopeful legacies of the Progressive Era.

Although the dissertation phase of this project is ending, it is only the beginning for “Democratic Ensembles.” In the months and years to come, I intend to transform the dissertation into a book that has crossover appeal for scholars, practitioners, and the wider public. I look forward to continuing to mine settlement archives and sharing the stories they contain in a variety of formats, from academic writing to public performance.[4] The questions posed by settlement workers and participants over a century ago remain relevant today: as we continue to work towards more inclusive and equitable futures, how can engaging in everyday acts of cultural production help to foster common understanding, celebrate diversity, and provide the framework for an ensemble-based politics?

Fiona Maxwell is a final-year PhD Candidate in History at the University of Chicago. Her research and creative practice explore the connections between spoken performance and democratic social movements, with a focus on Progressive Era Chicago. In addition to her own writing and performance activities she collaborates with museums and arts organizations on content and program development. You can reach her at fmaxwell@uchicago.edu.

[1] I detail a key facet of this archive—club newspapers—in Fiona Maxwell, “Club Newspapers and Civic Collaboration at Chicago Settlement Houses,” C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Podcast, Season 8, Episode 3 (October 21, 2024). https://on.soundcloud.com/FY7sAtBt6ePA84pZ7

[2] For an article-length study of the gender dynamics of oratorical pedagogy at the Cumnock School, see Fiona Maxwell, “‘Expression is power’: Gender, residual culture and political aspiration at the Cumnock School of Oratory, 1870–1900,” Gender & History (2024): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12786

[3] For an example of this process, as illustrated by the Home Culture Club of young workingwomen, see Fiona Maxwell, “‘Talking lowd and laughing gay, Everyone has so much to say’: Working Girls’ Clubs, Spoken Art and Political Organising at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890–1920,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal (2025): 109-130. http://doi.org/10.22459/LFHJ.30

[4] I perform original, semi-fictional storytelling pieces based on settlement archival materials at universities, public history sites, and storytelling venues. Select appearances include Open House Chicago at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (2024) and Chicago Storytelling in Bughouse Square at the Newberry Library (2022).

February 16, 2021

Teaching Jane Addams in High School AP Classes

We are delighted to announce that, with a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, we will be working with a group of New Jersey high school teachers and an educator from the Jane Addams – Hull-House Museum to explore ways to use the Jane Addams Digital Edition in high school AP classes.

The award, Developing Digital Educational Modules for High School AP Courses, will support a series of virtual meetings between Addams Project staff, and a select group of high school teachers from around the state. We are especially excited to also be working with Michael Ramirez, the Education Manager at the Jane Addams – Hull-House Museum in Chicago.

Two Ramapo College teacher-education students, Allie Cheff and Marina Kaiafas, will work with the teachers and Addams staff to develop primary-source-based educational materials that draw from the digital edition.

Jane Addams’s work during the Progressive Era and early 20th century was wide-ranging, and available topics range from her work in establishing social settlements, professionalizing social work, fighting against child labor and the persecution of immigrants and African-Americans, working to win support for woman suffrage, and her efforts for peace and social justice through the Woman’s Peace Party and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

We will hold a virtual symposium at the end of the grant to talk about what we learned and make publicly available to the materials on the project’s Education hub. We will also develop a guide for archives and other editing projects to help them create similar resources based on their holdings.

Teachers invited to participate are from all over the state and have extensive teaching experience. They are: Staci Anson (Ramapo High School), Yvonne Beatrice (Mahwah High School, ret.), Katherine DeVillasanta (Clearville Regional High School), Joseph Dobis (Franklin High School), Joseph Dwyer (Nutley Public Schools), Angela Funk (Indian Hills High School), Keri Giannotti (Bloomfield High School), Scott Kercher (Sparta High School), Faye Johnson Brimm Medical Arts High School), Allison McCabe Matto (Red Bank Regional High School), Louis Moore (Red Bank Regional High School), Frank Romano, Jr. (Perth Amboy Public School), Robert Schulte (Neptune High School), and Patricia Yale (Hillsborough High Schoo).

This grant builds on work that we did a few years back, also funded by the NJ Council for the Humanities, that developed National History Day guides and lesson plans using the digital edition for middle school students. Renee Delora, who led that effort, has joined this project to provide support to the student workers.