thing from church to state, from the tallest tome, no matter how thick, down to the smallest affairs, of tokens and souvenirs and lady-actress's feet—of poets and dogs, of paintings and side-walks, of Bentham and Jeffrey, and sleigh-rides and huskings, of politics and religion, and 'courting' and 'blackberrying. The magazine's greatest impact on literature was uplifting new voices like John Greenleaf Whittier, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Most of the new writers whose works he published and wrote about in The Yankee were women. Lecturing Between 1829 and 1848, Neal supplemented his income as a lecturer. Traveling on the lyceum circuit, he covered topics such as "literature, eloquence, the fine arts, political economy, temperance, poets and poetry, public-speaking, our pilgrim-fathers, colonization, law and lawyers, the study of languages, natural-history, phrenology, women's-rights, self-education, self-reliance, and self-distrust, progress of opinion, &c., &c., &c.". When asked without notice to address the theme of freedom in Portland, Maine, on Independence Day 1832, Neal accepted and gave an unprepared speech that was his first on women's rights. He used the principles of the American Revolution to attack slavery as an affront to liberty, and female disfranchisement and coverture as taxation without representation. Women's rights became a favorite topic of his frequent lecture engagements between 1832 and 1843 throughout the northeastern states. Because they were almost always published afterward and often covered in newspaper reviews, these events broadened Neal's sphere of influence and made his ideas accessible to readers not necessarily aligned with his views. Margaret Fuller admired Neal's "magnetic genius", "lion heart", and "sense of the ludicrous" as a lecturer, though she poked fun at his "exaggeration and coxcombry". His most well-attended and influential address was the 1843 "Rights of Women" speech at New York City's largest auditorium at the time, the Broadway Tabernacle. Activism Using magazine and newspaper articles, short stories, novels, lectures, political organizing, and personal relationships, Neal throughout his adult life addressed issues including feminism, women's rights, slavery, rights of free Black Americans, rights of American Indians, dueling, temperance, lotteries, capital punishment, militia tax, insolvency law, and social hierarchy. Of these, "women's rights were the cause for which he fought longer and more consistently than for any other." Much of Neal's writing and lecturing on these topics demonstrated "a basic distrust of institutions and a continuing plea for self-examination and self-reliance". Additionally, Neal was heavily