Preceded by the British mechanics' institutes, the first lyceum in America was established at Millbury, Massachusetts, by Josiah Holbrook, in 1826. The lyceum, a vehicle for adult education, grew out of the Enlightenment ideal of making knowledge available to all, not just to the privileged. (The constitutionally stated purpose of the Concord Lyceum, for example, was "improvement in knowledge, the advancement of Popular Education, and the diffusion of useful information throughout the community.") In addition to providing programs of lecture and debate, lyceums also promoted libraries and museums. The lyceum was not confined to New England. Once established, it spread rapidly westward as new regions were settled. Popular lecturers traveled long distances by railroad to speak. Lyceum lectures ran a broad gamut of subjects, literary, scientific, historical, social, and political, controversial as well as noncontroversial. Beyond the Transcendentalists, some well-known lyceum speakers included Louis Agassiz, Daniel Webster, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony.
The lyceum movement was important to Emerson and Thoreau as writers, because some of what they first presented formally as lyceum lectures — many of Emerson's essays, for example, and Thoreau's essay "Walking" — was later revised for publication. Like the journals that these writers kept, an invitation to lecture provided an opportunity to record and develop thoughts that would later be refined.
Although the lyceum movement did not turn Everyman into a Transcendentalist, it allowed the New England Transcendentalists to connect with a far broader segment of the population than their writings alone reached. In his biography of his father, Edward Waldo Emerson related an anecdote about a woman (a working domestic) who regularly attended Emerson's lectures. When asked if she understood Emerson, the lady replied, "Not a word, but I like to go and see him stand up there and look as if he thought every one was as good as he was." Emerson clearly conveyed to his audiences a sense of the democratic impulse underlying Transcendentalism, expressed so clearly in his 1844 lecture "New England Reformers": "And as a man is equal to the Church and equal to the State, so he is equal to every other man."
