John Lawson Stoddard
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John Lawson Stoddard (1850-1931) was an American lecturer and writer, focusing on travel subjects in the late nineteenth century.
[edit] Biography
Stoddard was born in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1850. He began traveling around the world in 1879, and published Red Letter Days Abroad in 1883. He turned his experiences into a series of popular lectures delivered throughout North America. These lectures were also published in book form under the title of Stoddard's Lectures, which eventually numbered ten volumes, and five supplements. The books include numerous illustrations derived from the immense catalog of photographs taken by Stoddard, and cover every subject, from art and architecture, to archeaology and natural history. The books were immensely popular in their day and many copies still survive. Later in life, Stoddard also published poetry, as well as books on religious subjects.
Stoddard was a proponent of the restoration of the Jews to Israel. In Stoddars's Lectures he told the Jews, “You are a people without a country; there is a country without a people. Be united. Fulfill the dreams of your old poets and patriarchs. Go back, go back to the land of Abraham.” A sentiment popularized as "A land without a people for a people without a land ."
