The Story of Chautauqua

The Chautauqua Institution is a summer residential center for the arts, education, religion, and recreation. One of the most important components of each nine-week season is the morning lecture each weekday in the institution's historic Amphitheater. The lecture series presents outstanding speakers whose thought-provoking topics encourage the active participation of Chautauqua audiences in lively question-and-answer sessions. In recent years selected weeks have been designated as Chautauqua conferences. The conference weeks provide additional opportunities for the discussion of related issues.

A few who have shared the platform since Chautauqua's founding in 1874 are:

United States Presidents: Bill Clinton, Gerald R. Ford, James A. Garfield, Rutherford B. Hayes, William McKinley, Ronald Reagan (via satellite), Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft. Presidential Candidates: John Anderson, Williams Jennings Bryan, Thomas E. Dewey, Barry Goldwater, Charles Evans Hughes, Robert Kennedy, Alf Landon, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Edmund Muskie, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, Al Smith, Harold Stassen, Norman Thomas, Henry Wallace. Ulysses S. Grant visited Chautauqua, but did not speak here.

Foreign Head of State: Carlos Roberto Reina, president of Honduras

In addition:

David Abshire, Bella Abzug, Jane Addams, Lamar Alexander, HRH Princess Wijdan Ali, Cleveland Amory, Susan B. Anthony, Oscar Arias, Karen Armstrong, Christiaan Barnard, Mary Catherine Bateson, Gregory Bateson, Robert Bellah, Alexander Graham Bell, Griffin B. Bell, Jules Bergman, Michael Beschloss, Bruno Bettelheim, Unita Blackwell, Roy Blount Jr., Earl Blumenauer, Sissela Bok, Julian Bond, Daniel Boorstin, Joan Borysenko, Leon Botstein, Ernest Boyer, Bill Bradley, Daniel L. Bratton, David S. Broder, Lester Brown, Tony Brown, Ralph Bunche, James Macgregor Burns, Barbara Bush, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, Frank C. Carlucci III, Liz Carpenter, Stephen Carter, Christopher Cerf, Schuyler Chapin, Linda Chavez, Lynne C. Cheney, Shirley Chisholm, Deepak Chopra, John Ciardi, Hillary Clinton, Andrei Codrescu, Robert Coles, Michael Collins, William E. Colby, Norman Cousins, Judith Crist, Candy Crowley, Mario Cuomo, Jacques D'Amboise, Michael DeBakey, JohnDewey, E.J. Dionne, Everett M. Dirkson, Lou Dobbs, Bob Dole, Norman Dorsen, Freeman J. Dyson, Amelia Earhart, Sylvia Earle, John Eaton, Marian Wright Edelman, Elliot W. Eisner, Joycelyn Elders, Joseph Ellis, James Fallows, Gloria Feldt, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Geraldine A. Ferraro, Henry Ford, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Betty Friedan, John E. Frohnmayer, Edwin J. Feulner Jr., Buckminster Fuller, George Gallup Jr., Howard Gardner, John Gardner, John Kenneth Galbraith, Henry Louis Gates Jr., David Gergen, Georgie Anne Geyer, Nancy Gibbs, Paul Goldberger, Jane Goodall, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Al Gore, Tipper Gore, Stephen Jay Gould, J. Peter Grace, Brian Greene, John Guare, A. R. Gurney, Karl Haas, Alexander Haig Jr., Alex Haley, Henry Heimlich, Lorin Hollander, Amory Houghton Jr., John Houseman, Jesse Jackson, Elizabeth & Eliot Janeway, Leon Jaworski, Hamilton Jordan, Bernard Kalb, Elaine Kamarck, Nancy Kassebaum, Ahmed M. Kathrada, Alfred Kazin, Helen Keller, Sharon Pratt Kelly, Jack Kemp, Geoffrey Kemp, Ken Kesey, Rudyard Kipling, Anna Kisselgoff, Ed Koch, Morton M. Kondracke, Wendy Kopp, Ted Koppel, Jonathan Kozol, William Kristol, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Madeleine Kunin, Stanley Kunitz, Lawrence Kushner, Richard Lamm, Philip Lader, Loretta LaRoche, Wassily Leontief, Arthur Levine, David Levering Lewis, Thomas Lickona, James R. Lilley, John V. Lindsay, Vachel Lindsay, Sol Linowitz, Betty Bao Lord, Glenn Loury, Amory Lovins, Stan Lundine, Julianne Malveaux, Thomas E. Mann, Ellis Marsalis, Michael A. Marletta, Thurgood Marshall, Martin E. Marty, Raymond Massey, Masters & Johnson, Jack Matlock, James McBride, David McCullough, Charles McDowell, Bud McFarlane, Margaret Mead, Karl Menninger, Edwin Meese III, Newton N. Minow, Edgar D. Mitchell, Pat Mitchell, Ashley Montague, Patrick Moynihan, Ralph Nader, John Naisbitt, Nicholas Negroponte, Reinhold Niebuhr, Christiane Northup, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Sherwin B. Nuland, Sandra Day O'Connor, Dean Ornish, Norman J. Ornstein, Mark Palmer, Drew Pearson, Robert H. Pelletrau, Richard Perle, William J. Perry, Roger Tory Peterson, Kevin Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Vladimir Pozner, William Proxmire, Anna Quindlen, Itamar Rabinovich, Maureen Reagan, Carlos Roberto Reina, Uwe E. Reinhardt, Elliot Richardson, Tom Ridge, Jeremy Rifkin, James Whitcomb Riley, Charles S. Robb, Cokie & Steve Roberts, Randall Robinson, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Nelson A. Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., James Roosevelt, Roger Rosenblatt, Carl Rowen, Louis Rukeyser, Tim Russert, Roald Sagdeev, Harrison Salisbury, Jonas Salk, David Saperstein, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., James R. Schlesinger, Charles Schumer, L. William Seidman, Raymond P. Shafer, Albert Shanker, Sally Shelton-Colby, Jean Shepherd, Lynn Sherr, John Silber, Leonard Silk, Theodore R. Sizer, Huston Smith, Hedrick Smith, Perry Smith, Tony Snow, Oleg Sokolov, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Susan Sontag, Jonathan D. Spence, S. Frederick Starr, Harold E. Stassen, Gloria Steinem, Adlai Stevenson, James B. Stewart, Carl Stokes, Maurice Strong, Kathleen M. Sullivan, Paul J. Tagliabue, Ida M. Tarbell, Maxwell Taylor, Edward Teller, Valentina Tereshkova, Helen Thomas, Lowell Thomas, Lester Thurow, Tom Toles, Abdullah Toukan, Stewart Udall, Richard Valeriani, Tara VanDerveer, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Yuli M. Voronstsov, Sol Wachtler, Booker T. Washington, Ben Wattenberg, Cornel West, John Whitehead, Roger Wilkins, Roy Wilkins, Betty Williams, Juan Williams, Andrew Young, Fareed Zakaria, Ruben Zamora, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser.