Books in the Rhetoric and Public Affairs series

Demonstrates how orators and advocates can channel the frustrations and energies of the American people toward productive, democratic, intellectual ends.

The second Red Scare was a charade orchestrated by a tyrant with the express goal of undermining the New Deal, so argues Stephen M. Underhill in this hard-hitting analysis of J. Edgar Hoover's rhetorical agency.

Charts this tension between bioethical memory and minimal remembrance across three cases - the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook Hepatitis Study, and the Cincinnati Whole Body Radiation Study - that highlight the shift from robust bioethical memory to minimal remembrance to forgetting.

The first serious study of his discourse in nearly a quarter century, this book examines the major speeches of Kennedy's presidency, from his famed but controversial inaugural address to his belated but powerful demand for civil rights.

Uses a set of letters sent to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 by American clergymen to make a larger argument about the rhetorical processes of our national politics. Taking one specific moment of political change, the author illuminates the larger processes of change, competition, and stability in national politics.

Christian Fundamentalism is a doctrine and a discourse in tension. Fundamentalists describe themselves as both marginal and a majority. They announce the imminent end of the world while building massive megachurches and political lobbying organizations. They speak of the need for purity and separation from the outside world while continually innovating in their search for more effective and persuasive ways to communicate with and convert outsiders. To many outsiders, Fundamentalist speech seems contradictory, irrational, intolerant, and dangerously antidemocratic. To understand the complexity of Fundamentalism, we have to look inside the tensions and the paradoxes. We have to take seriously the ways in which Fundamentalists describe themselves to themselves, and to do that, we must begin by exploring the central role of "e;the church"e; in Fundamentalist rhetoric and politics. Drawing on five fascinating case studies, Superchurch blends a complex yet readable treatment of rhetorical and political theory with a sophisticated approach to Fundamentalism that neither dismisses its appeal nor glosses over its irresolvable tensions. Edwards challenges theories of rhetoric, counterpublics, deliberation, and civility while offering critical new insights into the evolution and continuing influence of one of the most significant cultural and political movements of the past century.

Introducing the central insights of one of the most innovative and prolific rhetoricians of the 20th century, Michael Leff. This volume charts Leff 's development as a scholar, revealing both the variety of topics and the approach that marked his oeuvre, as well as his long-standing critique of the disciplinary assumptions of classical, Hellenistic, renaissance, modern, and postmodern rhetoric.