Historical and heritage tourism is a booming industry across the United States, and southern states in particular offer tourists the chance to walk the streets where some of the United States’ most dramatic racial conflicts unfolded. In these contexts, publics are invited to remember slavery in strategic ways. This essay enriches rhetorical studies’ understanding of the relationship between place and public memory by offering a robust consideration of tourism as a constitutive component of memory environments. We do so through a closer look at the memories of urban slavery and rebellion that circulate in Charleston, South Carolina’s historical tourism industry.

This essay offers an earlier chapter in the history of African American literacy by examining colonial literacy campaigns within the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The discussion focuses on one such transatlantic effort spanning from London to Barbados, South Carolina, and West Africa, which used enslaved teachers as agents of literacy.

Abstract This article examines two texts important in American rhetorical history, Caleb Bingham's 1794 American Preceptor and Eliphalet Pearson's 1802 abridgment of Blair's Lectures. These schoolbooks challenge accepted historiographies of late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century rhetoric in two ways: they demonstrate that neoclassicism encompassed a much greater variety of ancient figures and texts than is usually presumed, and they suggest that neoclassical rhetorics operated within a more complicated sociopolitical milieu than is commonly understood. Bingham and Pearson emerge as key figures in early American rhetorical history and their books prompt reconsideration of American neoclassicism.