Historical nonfiction is effective in teaching rhetoric for two main reasons. First, historical texts communicate through a real-world lens that students can understand and find familiar. Students study history and are exposed to current events through the news, school, and each other. Second, since history affects people's lives so broadly, its…

In 1823, a series of events, centering around a slave rebellion in Demerara, had a significant impact on the developing rhetoric of anti-slavery in England. This impact and the Parliamentary debates which resulted from the uprising are examined. (JF)

Examines three rhetorical techniques that Franklin D. Roosevelt used in his "First Inaugural Address" to announce and implement his New Deal. The various speech drafts examined reveal that he purposefully used military metaphor, the scapegoat, and the carrot-and-stick approach to accomplish certain persuasive goals. (JMF)

The English teaching profession, spurred on by media and federal politics, has tended to construct aesthetic reading and political reading within a dichotomous conceptual framework (Morgan, 1997; Devine, 2004; Donnelly, 2007). The article argues that this need not be so, and that the two apparently opposed modes of reading can be performed not…

Applies the critical paradigm of "rhetorical enterprise" to nineteenth century British reform efforts, particularly the Birmingham Political Union. Concludes that cases of rhetorical enterprise challenge critics to account for the enterprising consistency of tactics and creed, regardless of the relatively inconsistent factors of men and…

Recent developments and the present state of scholarship in Ciceroniana are surveyed in this booklet. Roman history and literature are reflected in discussion of the speeches, letters, philosophical and rhetorical writings, and political involvement of Cicero. Nineteenth-century literary criticism of Cicero is largely rejected in this survey in…

Discusses how the alienation of the electorate and the incessant probing of the press came together in 1976 to affect the rhetorical techniques and strategies available to presidential candidates to defend themselves from attacks on their character and integrity. (JMF)

Discusses the appropriateness of Richard Nixon's staging a ceremony to nominate Gerald Ford as vice-president following Spiro Agnew's resignation, in terms of generic transference (superimposing an established rhetorical form onto an unprecedented rhetorical situation). The ceremony reaffirmed American values and temporarily suspended growing…

Ronald Reagan's rise from political neophyte to Republican candidate for governor of California in 1966 was characterized by a public relations strategy, which was bolstered by "The Speech," a 30-minute anti-big government, defense-of-freedom message. He presented this message appropriately to each audience to identify himself with…

Discusses President Carter's televised address on the Panama Canal Treaties in terms of five "topoi" for a rhetoric of retreat: timeliness, urgency, value, advantage, and shrewdness. Compares his failure to employ the commonsense arguments that a policy of retreat requires in the televised speech with his more successful impromptu…

Describes a set of instrumental and consummatory functions served by presidential campaigning, and analyzes the objects and acts which manifest those functions. (JMF)

Examines, rhetorically, the formal dynamics and internal action of an eighteenth-century political text by Edmund Burke, the "Letter to William Elliott, Esq." (1795). (SR)