John Stoddard

John Lawson Stoddard was an American writer and lecturer who gained popularity through his travelogues. He transformed his global travel experiences into a series of popular lectures and subsequently into extensive publications. His works, drawing from an immense catalog of photographs, covered a wide range of subjects from art and architecture to archaeology and natural history. Stoddard, who transitioned from a Protestant upbringing to agnosticism and finally converted to Roman Catholicism, also engaged in writing poetry and religious works. He was also a proponent of the restoration of Jews to Israel, sentiments later popularized as 'a land without a people for a people without a land.'