Self-Improvement

Two of the most celebrated public speakers in American history, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, taught themselves the skills of oratory from a popular textbook.

In a semi-autobiographical novel, Jack London made the case that reading widely is both gratifying and liberating, but poverty robs people of the time and energy required for such self-education.

In the 19th century and today, Americans have often blamed distraction on the individual, and sought its cure in the disciplined cultivation of attention - but is that a battle we're destined to lose?

The history of women's physical fitness reveals a tension between the pressure to conform to society's beauty ideals and the possibility of feminist resistance through physical strength.

While mid-19th century moral reformers promoted vegetarianism as a tool of social change, the subsequent generation saw it as a tool for personal economic success.

In response to late 19th-and early 20th-century ideas that one's body revealed one's character, Black women striving for racial uplift used physical fitness to prove their civic fitness.

Protein bars, sugar-free cookies, and feelings of guilt in the grocery aisle have origins, in part, in an early 20th-century movement that emphasized individual choice and self-control as the path to health.

California's countercultural retreats, feminist clinics, and gym culture sparked a wellness movement in the 1970s that connected the mind and body.

From broadsides to televangelists to social media, Americans have a long history of viewing religion as a "therapeutic culture" and seeking out technologies that deliver prompts for self-care.

In addition to offering spirituality and community, Nation of Islam has a long history of training incarcerated men in methods of peaceful resistance, effective communication, rights advocacy, and healthy living.

How a genre of DIY organizing strategies for working class collectivist mutual aid efforts turned instead to cater to bourgeois anxieties around securing and advancing an individual's social position.

As in the Victorian era, many of today's upper-middlc-class self-improvement fads are strategies for asserting one's social position, masquerading as the pursuit of individual virtue.

The struggles and failures the Transcendentalists faced in their efforts of self-improvement and social reform serve as a warning that looking inward for solutions may mask the need for broader structural change.