Past Festivals

2011  Ideas that Changed America

• James Madison and Thomas Jefferson (Winter Chautauqua)
• John Muir
• Albert Einstein
• Frances Perkins
• W.E.B. Du Bois
• Mark Twain

2010 American Imagination

• Thomas Jefferson (Winter Chautauqua)
• Benjamin Franklin
• Thomas Edison
• Emily Dickinson
• Langston Hughes
• Dr. Seuss

2009 America in Crisis

• Robert E. Lee and Wade Hampton III (Winter Chautauqua)
• George Washington
• Abraham Lincoln
• Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• Rosa Parks 

2008 The Land, what will our children inherit?

• Panel - Georgia O'Keefe, Ansel Adams, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt
• John James Audubon
• James Beckwourth
• Black Elk
• Teddy Roosevelt
• Rachel Carson 

2007 The American Stage - Spotlight on Ourselves

• P.T. Barnum (Winter Chautauqua)
• Houdini
• Mark Twain
• Will Rogers
• Lillian Hellman
• Paul Robeson

2006 Great American Journeys

• Sequoyah
• William Clark
• Herman Melville
• Harriet Tubman
• Mary Ingles (Winter Chautauqua also)

2005 The Civil War, as told by those who were there

• John C. Calhoun
• Abraham Lincoln
• Mary Chesnut
• Frederick Douglas
• Ambrose Bierce (also Winter Chautauqua)
• Sam Watkins (also Winter Chautauqua

2004  American Visions

• Pauli Murray (First Winter Chautauqua)
• Thomas Paine
• John Winthrop
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Eugene V. Debs
• Martin Luther King, Jr.

2003 American Autobiograpy

• Bejamin Franklin
• Henry Adams
• Andrew Carnegie
• Pauli Murray
• Eleanor Roosevelt

2002 America, Conceived in Liberty!

• Thomas Jefferson
• John and Abigail Adams
• Elizabeth Freeman
• Henry Laurens
• Alexander Hamilton

2001 American Renaissance

• Walt Whitman
• Louisa May Alcott
• Herman Melville
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Henry David Thoreau
• Frederick Douglass

2000  Southern Writers

• Zora Neal Hurston
• Katherine Anne Porter
• Thomas Wolfe
• William Faulkner
• Mark Twain

1999 American Humorists

• Mark Twain
• Will Rogers
• Langston Hughes
• James Thurber
• Dorothy Parker