Abstract This essay investigates the ways that some teachers colleges not typically considered in traditional histories of the Speech field reconfigured aspects of elocution or the performance arts through their teaching practices. Focusing on San Jose State Teachers College in the early decades of the twentieth century when Speech was emerging as a discipline, this analysis demonstrates how some speech teachers refashioned and democratized the teaching of oral reading, particularly the oral reading of poetry. In so doing, this study reveals the gendered nature of our standard histories while broadening our understanding of how teachers colleges fit into the disciplinary split between Speech and English.

Abstract This study features the activist rhetoric of early African American clergyman Richard Allen. Through chronological analyses of four late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts, we explore how Allen establishes individual and corporate agency and furthers an African American community consciousness. Allen's rhetoric, we argue, demonstrates the ways material and rhetorical opportunities affect textual production that, in turn, enables freedom and community to emerge. Paying particular attention to the strategy of the narrative account, we demonstrate how Allen's advocacy, which both works within and challenges the limitations imposed by white society, reflects and develops his identity as a black community leader.

Abstract This essay is an attempt at primary resource recovery to inform an under-studied moment from the Civil Rights Movement—the 1963 Mississippi Freedom Vote. Analysis of these primary texts reveals how the campaign used religious narratives and discourse to create political efficacy and agency among disenfranchised voters in Mississippi. It is this rhetorical transformation that holds the key to understanding how and why over 80,000 blacks who had never before participated in any sustained and organized political campaign chose to do so in the fall of 1963. Exploring these texts and events with a nuanced eye for religious and political discourse reveals how a rhetorical transformation from religious believers to political agents came about, and why it was successful in an overshadowed moment from the Civil Rights Movement.

AbstractThe U.S. Congress passed the General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887 as a part of its assimilationist plan to remake American Indians in the image of the U.S. nation. The act helped constitute a changed Native identity as it contracted reservation lines and forced an agricultural economy onto Native reservations. The Supreme Court case Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) resulted from American Indian protests of the Dawes Act, including the argument that the assimilationist plan had been implemented against Natives' will. The resulting decision granted Congress the ultimate “plenary” power to abrogate treaties without any limits because American Indians were wards. Through an analysis of the case and Indian Commissioner reports addressing plenary power, I argue that the Lone Wolf holding served as an imperial discourse that maligned American Indian identities through a parent-child relationship. This denigration manifested through Lone Wolf's construction of American Indians as cultural wards, its reduction of Native property to commodity through a westernized economic plan, and its assimilation of Native communities into dominant U.S. culture. In addition, I contend that the Lone Wolf case solidified a wider U.S. nationalism by emboldening federal power over indigenous communities through a familial rhetorical strategy.

AbstractTransformational speeches represent the relationship between rhetoric and history, particularly attempts to exert control at moments of change in the life of a political community. Such speeches re-imagine the definition, principles, or motivation of a community. They also enlarge the scope and vocabulary of political speech. Finally, they interpret or constitute situations at the boundary between past and future. Collected in this Collocutio are fresh translations of historically significant transformational speeches from Bulgaria, Cuba, Mexico, Poland, and Romania.

AbstractIn Blessed by Thunder: Memoir of a Cuban Girlhood, Flor Fernandez Barrios examines the consequences of Castro's Revolution and its silencing, censoring, and prohibitions on the writing, speaking, thinking, and performance of public rituals of communities and families. Barrios is able to use the history of storytelling and orality to integrate her roles as a daughter, granddaughter, and healer into a larger history of Cuban women who have preserved knowledge practices that exist outside of the state's masculine identity and its sanctioned social and medical institutions. As Barrios rewrites the Cuban Revolution through the collective memories of three generations of women in her family, she articulates her own Cuban-ness as well as her relationship to Afro-Cuban culture, an often-overlooked connection that tells us as much about upper-class culture on the island during this period in the early 1960s as it does about Afro-Cuban life practices such as Santería.

Abstract This essay inquires into the mechanisms that regulate construction of civic eulogies in Pericles' Funeral Oration and Rudolf Giuliani's “Citywide Prayer Service at Yankee Stadium.” The inquiry focuses upon how the speeches establish the relationship between the speaker and audience, employ rhetorical topoi, and develop argumentative strategies. In the end, it becomes clear that the speeches transact praise of the dead and exaltation of civic ideals with strikingly similar approaches.

Abstract Throughout the Civil War, editor-politicians fashioned Britain as a threat to the Union via the use of “John Bull rhetoric.” As purveyors of partisan expression, leading editors exploited precedents, historic memories and popular symbols, contemporary relations, and conspiracy theories related to Britain and its governing classes as a condensation symbol in the rhetoric of intra/inter-party politics. The direct effect on voters is impossible to quantify, but the editors' persistent and deliberative use of John Bull rhetoric to create a dangerous, external consequence to opponents' positions reveals that it was important in the wartime power struggle to control the country's ideological destiny.

Abstract As a child in Corduba, a Romanized city in southern Spain, the Elder Seneca was heavily influenced by Roman society and literary tastes. He left his home and his family, for long periods of time as an adult, to experience the talents of professional declaimers in Rome. From his memory of the controversiae and suasoriae of these declaimers, he wrote the Oratorum et rhetoruni sententiae, divisiones, colores. In his collection, along with various Roman and Greek declaimers, are several Spanish declaimers. Seneca claims he included them “not out of excess of enthusiasm for them, but on the basis of considered judgement” (Con. 10.pr.16). Here, I examine how Seneca presents these Spanish declaimers and their distinguishing characteristics, in comparison with Roman declamatory standards, and consider his purpose in doing so.

Abstract Although conventional views about late nineteenth-century rhetoric highlight a shift from oratory to composition and from classical rhetoric to a “new” rhetoric with origins in Scottish rhetoricians (with a loss of scholarship and quality), James M. Hoppin's Homiletics can be grouped with an increasing number of works that complicate such views. Hoppin focuses on oratory; reveals an especially broad and scholarly knowledge of classical, religious, and foreign rhetorics; uses a complex of ideas called “uniformitarianism” to justify his primary focus on classical rhetoric; and achieves high quality. His concept of invention has both classical and Christian roots in a complex relationship reflecting both scope and narrowness.

Abstract Ancient India formalized rhetorical debate in the Sanskrit Nyāya Sūtras. Still influential, they remain relatively unknown because India is thought more mystical than logical, because Nyāya has been misinterpreted through Greek logic and terminologies, and because of its epistemology and soteriology. Perrett's four Western “approaches” to India—“magisterial,” “exoticist,” “curatorial,” and “interlocutory”—provide perspective. Magisterial blindness and exoticist assumptions prohibit understanding of Nyāya and delay its inclusion in rhetorical studies. A curatorial/interlocutory approach (translation and elucidation) reveals Nyāya's nature, as well as its similarities with Aristotle's enthymeme and example, enriching our understanding of the history and nature of rhetoric.

Abstract This essays offers a rhetorical interpretation of judicial opinions Joseph Story wrote in four U.S. Supreme Court cases concerned with the slavery question: U.S. v. La Jeune Eugenie (1822), Groves v. Slaughter (1841), U.S. v. Amistad (1841), and Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842). I argue that Story, a jurist trained in the intellectual traditions of the early republic, performed judicial argument as a kind of rhetorical action dependent upon Ciceronian controversia, a mental habit of arguing pro et contra on any matter in dispute. In consequence of this approach to judicial argument, Story's opinions do not represent a choice between positive law or natural law, neither do they represent a commitment to legal instrumentalism or legal formalism; rather they present controversial responses to rhetorical situations broadly conceived.

Abstract This study features the contributions of nineteenth-century activist William Whipper to the African American rhetorical tradition. Through analyses of six texts written between 1828 and 1837, I detail Whipper's dedication to open civic discourse; his preference for appeals to reason; his Christian ethos; his appropriation of the rhetoric of white writers, which functions in service of his positive portrayal of black culture; and his mistrust of arguments based on expediency. I also demonstrate how these characteristics shape–and, to a certain extent, evolve in–Whipper's subsequent writings. The conclusion locates Whipper's rhetorical principles in the broader context of nineteenth-century African American rhetoric.

Abstract The Roman paterfamilias' power over his household, his patria potestas, was extreme and could encroach upon all domains of the lives of his dependants. Its most radical manifestation was the vitae necisque potestas, or the right to kill one's own children with impunity. There are twenty-two extant Roman declamations in which fathers have killed, or wish to kill, their sons. After an excursion into their juridical and historical background, I will discuss them briefly. It will appear that though sometimes critical of excesses, they serve to confirm rather than undermine the patria potestas.

Abstract This essay examines the debate regarding Pope Pius XII's lack of protest regarding ethnic massacres during World War II. By failing to publicly expose what was happening to Jews under Nazi occupation, Pius is seen as defaulting on his responsibility as moral leader. The mounting number of books on this subject indicates a persistent level of controversy that has not abated in the decades since the war. Criticisms about the Pope tend to attribute personal motives for his lack of oratory, indicative of malice or indifference. This conclusion is reached because contemporary critics assume that the pontiff, as head of his church, had a liberty of discourse and of personal independence in his style of rhetoric. This study, by contrast, posits the view that Pius was constrained rhetorically by the demands of his office. The statements of the previous pontiffs who were his predecessors indicate that Pius was conforming to a discursive style imposed by papal protocol and consistent with the ornately impersonal linguistic style that characterizes Vatican documents. Applying a rhetorical lens to the pontiff's peculiar reticence provides a way to penetrate the historical impasse surrounding this disputed figure.

Abstract This essay is an inquiry into Heraclitus' conception of logos and its importance for sophistic thought. Following G. S. Kirk, I argue that Heraclitus used logos to designate structure or ordered composition, both in language and in the physical world. Further, I propose that early sophists like Gorgias and Protagoras shared with Heraclitus a structural conception of logos. The essay proceeds by reviewing various understandings of Heraclitus and his philosophy, making the case that Heraclitus did use logos to signify structure or “ordered composition,” and by exploring the relationship between Heraclitus, read in this way, and the sophists.

Abstract At Pseudolus 41–73 Plautus represents the slave Pseudolus as reading a passionate letter from the courtesan Phoenicium to his master, Calidorus. Pseudolus and Calidorus offer strikingly different reactions to the letter. Calidorus praises its style and content, but Pseudolus ridicules both—with a string of sexual insults. In this essay I focus upon gender and class as factors in the literary reception of Phoenicium's writing in Plautus' comedy. My discussion compares the writing attributed to Phoenicium with several second century BCE texts by men. In light of these comparisons, I argue that Pseudolus unfairly holds Phoenicium's writing to standards different from those applied to males, and I suggest that social class—that of the critic as well as the writer—played a complex role in the public assessment of what Roman women said and how they said it.

Abstract Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704) is today regarded as the most important French preacher of the Ancien Régime; yet, this was not always the case. In fact, before the nineteenth century, Bossuet's reputation was no greater than that of his contemporary counterparts, especially Louis Bourdaloue (1632–1704) and Jean-Baptiste Massillon (1662–1742). What happened to cause Bossuet's rise to rhetorical preeminence in post-revolutionary France? A survey of how French literary historians of the past three centuries have received Bossuet's oratorical works suggests an answer, as well as exposes the rhetorical dimensions of appropriation itself.

Abstract This essay considers the diverse pedagogical purposes the study of drama served in the rhetorical preparation of teachers at three progressive-era normal schools for women, the Framingham, Westfield, and Salem State Normal Schools. Drawing on scholarship and archival materials, I argue that these normal schools both introduced future teachers to drama as a tool to help their pupils learn and employed dramatic activity as a means to prepare future teachers for their lives in the classroom. Through work in drama, future teachers made explicit connections between learning and playmaking, pedagogy and theatrics, teaching and performance.

Abstract A case study of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, can inform nineteenth-century North American rhetorical history by exposing the interplay of rhetorical theory and practice in an educational setting during the antebellum period. Evidence of this interplay emerges in the subject matter of students' quarterly exhibition and commencement orations and of their literary society presentations from 1823 to 1845. When considered as a curricular whole, this evidence suggests a symbiotic relationship between the primarily moralistic and belletristic discourse favored by the college's curriculum and the more broadly civic judicial and deliberative discourse favored by its literary societies.

Abstract The performative dimension of oral rhetoric has been a central concern of theorists throughout the history of the tradition. Awareness of the persuasive power of the human voice is especially conspicuous in the teachings of Gorgias of Leontini. When he claims that “speech is a powerful lord,” Gorgias articulates a profound insight into how the human mind and body respond to sounds produced by the voice. By examining Gorgias' views of the potency of speech in the context of the oral, poetic tradition of ancient Greece, we can appreciate more fully the sources of this insight. Moreover, contemporary research in psycho-physiology suggests that Gorgias grasped an important dimension of the human mind's fundamental nature.

Abstract The rise of Lech Walesa from shipyard electrician to leader of “Solidarity,” international icon of freedom, and first president of democratic Poland was closely bound up with rhetoric. Walesa's idiosyncratic verbal style galvanized the masses and successfully confronted communist propaganda. The revolution of the workers on the Baltic coast was to a large extent a revolution in language. Walesa was also a skilled negotiator. As president, however, he was a controversial figure; his conception of democracy as a continuing war of words is widely credited with spelling the end of the idealistic “Solidarity” era. Today, allegations remain that Walesa was an agent provocateur and that the Polish revolution may have been a provocation that got out of hand. Some allege that Walesa's myth was a creation of Western media, a function of people's desires, and an accident of the historical moment. While there is no proof that any of these allegations are true and the documentary record reveals Walesa's undeniable rhetorical prowess and political talent, his case provides material for reflection on the relationship between history, rhetoric, and political agency.