Abstract This essay serves as the introductory essay for this special issue on “The Rhetoric of Violence.” In conversation with the six other essays in this special issue, I suggest that scholars in our field need to focus more explicitly on the rhetorical purposes of physical violence. To support that suggestion, I offer a working definition of how we might conceptualize violence broadly and then distinguish physical violence from two others kinds that rhetorical scholars have been studying for years now—rhetorical violence and structural violence. Distinguishing that first mode of violence as worthy of more of our attention. I then argue that the primary purpose of most physical violence is to affectively and symbolically define and reinforce individual and group identities.

AbstractAs a subfield of rhetorical studies, public address has been conservative and defensive from the start in its method, theory, politics, and even subject. Even as there has been an expansion of the subject (i.e., the “text” to be studied), the field has, on the whole, remained skeptical of new methods, all critical theories, and alternative political motives. Because of this, the subfield of public address has remained incredibly white and largely male. If the subfield is to continue to exist and, perhaps, thrive, it is time for a clear change in tack. Public address must open its gates widely to the critical methods and theories that can allow for more diverse knowledge production and reorient the field’s political goals. And in a reversal, public address should define itself solely around the study of speeches directed at publics.

Abstract Scholars have repeatedly argued that Harry Truman’s decision to create the President’s Committee on Civil Rights would ultimately influence civil rights in the United States for many years afterward. However, scholars have been less clear in explaining what led Truman to act on civil rights in the first place. One important factor in the Truman administration’s creation of the committee that is often mentioned but almost never given as much attention as it deserves is the 1946 Georgia Lynching. Through a reception study of the articles, congressional debates, editorials, and speeches that responded to the murders, this essay argues that the murders of four African Americans in a small, rural town were transformed into a national focusing event because of how several key interpretive decisions emerged from the basic facts of the lynching in conjunction with larger cultural concerns. This analysis both highlights how the mass lynching came to have cultural significance and argues for the importance of rhetorical scholarship that engages the role of focusing events in both public debate and policy creation.