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Building on the scholarship of Nedra Reynolds, Dale Sullivan, and recent feminist scholars writing on ethos, this article argues that blame is a vehicle that rhetors can use to enhance their ēthē. Specifically, this article shows that blame can modify social mores when used by an ethically strong rhetor who censures another individual with a strong ethos. To make this argument, this article considers the rhetoric of a nineteenth-century French-American Catholic Sister living at the intersection of various worlds, as the article illustrates how she, when challenged by an American bishop, used a rhetoric of blame to further enhance her ethos.

This article analyzes the rhetorical practices at a nineteenth-century Catholic school run by women religious for young women of all faiths. This school, St. Mary-of-the-Woods, embraced its motto “virtue and knowledge combined” to achieve its goal of establishing the French religious spirit in a country with anti-Catholic biases. Teaching lessons based on their French traditions, the sisters replaced lessons in religion with ones on morality and virtue. Thus the sisters promoted their French religious spirit without appearing to proselytize; even without converting students to Catholicism, the sisters succeeded in helping to establish the “French religious spirit” in Indiana.

Abstract Focusing on a seacoast New Hampshire African American burying ground and the grave of a white woman buried in a Massachusetts rural cemetery, this article considers how the essential nature of the cemetery makes it both a very usual and unusual memory place. Considering de Certeau's distinctions between space and place as well as Foucault's definition of a heterotopia, this paper argues that the paradoxes of the heterotopia combined with the symbolism and materiality of the grave make the cemetery a particularly potent lieu de mémoire for those otherwise forgotten in public memory.

Abstract Much about the trope of irony is confusing. However, a consideration of the similarities between irony and African American Signification can help us recognize that this confusion can empower rhetors. One rhetor who can illustrate this power is Fanny Fern, a white nineteenth‐century American newspaper columnist whose rhetoric could be described as Signification. Simultaneously praising and condemning subjects such as suffrage, Fern was able to write on subjects forbidden to many. In addition, Fern's use of Signifyin(g) ironic rhetoric illustrates that language is not as determined as many would believe.