Drunkard's Story

Descripción

An unparalleled portrait of nineteenth-century social reform and the magnetic oratory that gave it force, told through the career of temperance advocate John B. Gough. John B. Gough was perhaps nineteenth-century Americas most famous ex-drunkarda man who had hit rock bottom but then found the determination to recover and preach sobriety with unusual scope and impact. Through an exploration of Goughs life, Thomas Augst investigates a world in which a public speaker could achieve immense fame by delivering a remarkable 12,000 popular lectures over his lifetime across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Gough kept a voluminous archive of his comings and goings, day after day, speech after speech. Augst is among the first scholars to fully mine these materials, and he uses them to illuminate the redemptive power of storytelling in the lives of citizens. In the process, A Drunkards Story follows an itinerant journey through the cultural history of social reform. John Goughs life was fascinating in its own right, but Augsts exploration of it also opens a window onto a rich interplay among performance, autobiography, and celebrity. The ways that people flocked to hear Gough tell his tale, and the contagious enthusiasm with which he was greeted far and wide, might seem from another timebut also surprisingly contemporary in the age of the influencer.