On Friday morning, December 2, 1955, less than 18 hours after Rosa Parks’s arrest, copies of an anonymous, half-page leaflet began circulating in Black neighborhoods of Montgomery, Alabama. It called for a 1-day boycott of city buses on Monday, December 5. The leaflet was the work of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), namely, its president, Jo Ann Robinson. After drafting the text on the night of December 1, she drove to her office at Alabama State College (ASC) to copy it, then, the next day, with helpers, distributed those copies across the city. By evening, nearly everyone in Montgomery’s Black community knew of the boycott plan. This article offers the fullest examination yet of that leaflet, one of the most impactful texts of its kind in U.S. history. It analyzes its composition, which drew on years of activism by the WPC; its reproduction, using a mimeograph machine at ASC; and its distribution, by car, foot, and hand, across a divided urban landscape. Rhetoric and writing studies help us uncover the material resources, social context, and situated processes that enabled that text; history reminds us of its extraordinary mobilizing power.

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Abstract Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address is a well-known and much-analyzed speech. But one prominent feature, its use of chiasmus (or inverse repetition), has gone largely unremarked, as it has gone largely unremarked in analyses of Lincoln's thought and language more generally. If chiasmus was important for Lincoln, however, it is curiously absent at a key moment in the Second Inaugural—the end of the third paragraph. Why? To answer that question is to understand something important about Lincoln's political and rhetorical ideology. Notes 1Thank you to RR reviewers Barbara Warnick and Andrew King and Editor Theresa Enos for their comments and encouragement regarding this essay. 2Michiko Kakutani, “Lincoln as the Visionary with His Eye on the Prize,” The New York Times, October 25, 2005. 3Nathan Neely Fleming was brother of my great-great-grandfather, John Giles Fleming, and namesake of my great-grandfather, his nephew. 4 Speech of N. N. Fleming, Esq., of Rowan, on the convention question, delivered in Committee of the Whole in the House of Commons of North-Carolina, January 16th, 1861 (Raleigh, NC: 1861). Available in The North Carolina Collection of the UNC Libraries, Chapel Hill, NC. I am grateful to Julie Oliver Fleming for locating and copying this speech. 5Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision. 6White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech; Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision. 7White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 151. 8See images of the manuscript in Lincoln's hand at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=pin_mssmisc&fileName=pin/pin2202/pin2202page.db&recNum=0&itemLink=r?ammem/pin:@field(NUMBER+pin2202))&linkText=0. I take my text from this manuscript, adding my own paragraph and sentence numbers (e.g., 2.4). A full version of the text with my lineation can be found at http://people.umass.edu/dfleming/english550-lincoln.html. 9White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech, is a good source on the background of the speech. 10Ibid. 165. 11The whole speech in fact is highly monosyllabic: 505 of 703 words are monosyllables according to White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 48. 12Cf. “government of the people, by the people, for the people” from the Gettysburg Address. 13Lincoln may have learned this formulation from Daniel Webster's 1830 speech against Hayne, with its call for “liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable” (Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 83, 113). 14Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science, 123. 15Dr. Mardy Grothe, Never Let a Fool Kiss You, or a Kiss Fool You (New York: Penguin, 1999). 16I take the example from Gideon Burton's “Forest of Rhetoric” website: http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm. 17Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science 123. 18John F. Kennedy Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961. 19Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science 135. 20“Chiasmus seems to set up a natural internal dynamic that draws the parts closer together, as if the second element wanted to flip over and back over the first… . The ABBA form seems to exhaust the possibilities of argument, as when Samuel Johnson destroyed an aspiring author with, ‘Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good’” (Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. [Berkeley: U of California P, 1991]: 33). 21PBS NewsHour, October 15, 2008. 22David Brooks, “Thinking About Obama,” The New York Times, October 17, 2008. 23Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 122 (quoting Elton Trueblood). 24A useful analysis of the different effects of chiasmus can be found in Clark, “‘Measure for Measure.’” 25As Kraemer notes (“‘It May Seem Strange’”), Garry Wills interpreted the Gettysburg Address chiastically, claiming that Lincoln turned the dedicatory function of the occasion upside down: “We cannot dedicate the field. The field must dedicate us” (Wills, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?” 63; see also 68). As far as I can tell, however, Wills never actually uses the word chiasmus in either his book-length treatment of that speech, Lincoln at Gettysburg, or the more pointed discussion of it in his article on the Second Inaugural (“Lincoln's Greatest Speech?”). Kraemer, however, does use the word chiasmus to talk about sentence 3.9 of the Second Inaugural, which I'll also examine below. But, as for more sustained treatments of chiasmus in Lincoln or in the Second Inaugural, Gardner's essay is the only example I could find, other than my own; his treatment, both of chiasmus and of the Second Inaugural, is so different from mine, however, that they are difficult to reconcile. The lack of attention to Lincoln's use of chiasmus in general, and its role in the Second Inaugural in particular, is curious given the detailed rhetorical analysis that is a staple of Lincoln scholarship (for examples of such analysis in terms of the Second Inaugural, see, for example, Slagell, “Anatomy of a Masterpiece”; White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech; and Wills's “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?”—none of which mentions chiasmus). Of course, many analysts have pointed out the balance and symmetry that characterize much of this speech, and several have further noted the tension here between a kind of New Testament discourse of charity and an Old Testament one of retribution. 26Ronald White (Lincoln's Greatest Speech) repeats a contemporary journalistic report that has Lincoln pausing significantly before sentence 2.5 (79). In support of that reading is the layout of Lincoln's actual delivery text (see Wilson's Lincoln's Sword), which can be viewed at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=pin_mssmisc&fileName=pin/pin2202/-pin2202page.db&recNum=5&itemLink=r?ammem/pin:@field(NUMBER+pin2202))&linkText=0. 27On the combination of chiasmus and paralipsis here, see also Kraemer, “‘It may seem strange.’” 28Miller, Lincoln's Virtue 275. 29Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), 6:409. 30White, The Eloquent President 125–52, 363–64, emphasis in original. 31They are, interestingly enough, arranged chiastically: OT NT NT OT. 32White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 101 33Williams, Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace 241. 34Ibid. 243. 35Interestingly, this is the first and only mention of “North” and “South” in the speech. 36Menand, Metaphysical Club 56. 37Among the killed: a confederate officer from North Carolina named Nathan Neely Fleming. 38Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision. 39These words were probably uttered very slowly. (In Lincoln's August 1863 letter to James Cook Conkling, which accompanied his written remarks for a Springfield rally, he had suggested, “Read it very slowly” [see White, The Eloquent President 193].) 40Don E. Fehrenbacher, qtd. in Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 38. 41David Herbert Donald, Lincoln 567. 42Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 138. 43Qtd. in Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 146. 44White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 162. 45Carwardine, Lincoln 246. 46Williams, Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace 242. 47Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 148. 48Qtd. in White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 141–43. “In Joshua Wolf Shenk's telling metaphor, Lincoln [saw clearly] by the summer of 1864 that he was NOT really the captain of the ship; but neither did he regard himself as an ‘idle passenger. [He was rather] a sailor on deck with a job to do’” (Wilson, Lincoln's Sword 261). 49A paraphrase of Lincoln's April 1864 letter to Albert G. Hodges, qtd. in Wills, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?” 66. 50See, for example, Slagell, “Anatomy of a Masterpiece”; Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision; White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech; Wills, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?” 51Qtd. in Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 64. 52Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 252–72. 53Abraham Lincoln, Speeches & Writings, 1859–1865, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (Library of America, 1989), 689, emphasis added; see also Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 144; and Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), 8:356. 54This ability of Lincoln to effect moral power without being moralizing is treated eloquently in Miller, Lincoln's Virtues, passim. 55Qtd. in White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 59. 56Thomas Mallon, “Set in Stone: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Memory,” The New Yorker, Oct. 13, 2008: 143. 57Wilson, “The Old Stone House” 130. 58White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 93–94. 59Ward, Burns, and Burns, The Civil War 360.

Sizing Up Rhetoric is a collection of thirty papers from the 2006 biennial conference of the Rhetoric Society of America, held in Memphis that May. As such, it presents a challenge for the book rev...

Progymnasmata are collections of speaking and writing exercises for students of rhetoric. As historians have shown, they played an extremely important role in European education from Antiquity to the beginnings of the Modern Era. Unfortunately, they are treated today, if at all, as an historical curiosity, a relic of the old "school rhetoric." Occasionally, there are attempts to revive the traditional sequence. Both approaches miss what I believe is most valuable about the progymnasmata, the very idea of a unified pedagogical program in the language arts, spanning primary, secondary, and higher education, oriented toward the shaping of rhetorical character, and organized around a sequence of well-defined exercises in verbal analysis and composition.

Abstract The Creek colony of Thurii, founded in southern Italy around 444, BCE, was apparently planned to be a model polis. Any reconstruction of that plan must be speculative, but the stories about Thurii suggest that its design incorporated three entities not usually linked — a democratic constitution, an orthogonal street layout, and a rhetorically‐oriented educational system. In trying to understand what these things might have had to do with one another, I examine the thought of three individuals who, sources tell us, participated in the colony: the rhêtor Pericles, who apparently instigated the project; the designer Hippodamus, who supposedly laid out its streets; and the sophist Protagoras, who reportedly wrote its laws. If indeed these three collaborated on Thurii, what they may have sought there was a “bounded”; democracy, a community of free and equal citizens, governed by open, transparent, and agonistic means but guided by an unmistakable sense of rightness, something manifest not only in the town's constitution but in its educational system and built space as well.

Examines the simultaneous rise of rhetorical theory and continued decline of rhetorical education. Presents and discusses three definitions of “rhetoric.” Argues for the historical prominence and continued relevance of the third definition: rhetoric as the study of speaking and writing well.

The essay begins with an intellectual framework for describing a visual‐verbal interface. Applying the implications of the framework to collaborative work, the authors illustrate ways in which they used this framework to observe and teach collaborative teams of graphic designers.