Stephen H. Browne

Remembering Crispus Attucks: Race, rhetoric, and the politics of commemoration

The symbolic career of Crispus Attucks provides a disturbing lesson in the politics of commemoration. This essay examines a complex process of rhetorical expropriation, whereby the rhetorical weight of the revolutionary hero was shifted from its origins in African American traditions of resistance onto grounds of racial accomodation. The work of public memory required to fund, build, and present the Crispus Attucks Memorial is treated here as evidence for the claim that people not only remember, but get remembered, and that under conditions of historical inequality, getting remembered must take on a politics of its own.

“Like gory spectres”: Representing evil in Theodore weld's American slavery as it is

Theodore Welds American Slavery As It Is signalled a key moment in the abolitionists efforts to represent slavery to optimal effect. The largest‐selling antislavery text prior to Uncle Toms Cabin, American Slavery was conspicuously graphic and unrelenting in its depictions of slaverys horrors. At the same time, it helped to set in place a vocabulary of images that has significant implications for the way in which we represent race relations in our time.

Encountering Angelina Grimké: Violence, identity, and the creation of radical community

Angelina Grimkes 1835 letter to William Lloyd Garrison announced her entrance into public life and the work of moral reform. Composed in a period of intense anti‐abolitionist activity, the text represents rhetorically a display of commitments put at risk. This essay conducts a close reading of the text to demonstrate how Grimke construes violence into a source for the refashioning of self and community into forces of change.

The Circle of Our Felicities: Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address and the Rhetoric of Nationhood

Jeffersons first inaugural address is best understood as a conspicuous display of its authors style and thought. It is a statement about what oratory ought to look and sound like to a nation of republicans. A speech about politics, it offers as well a politics of speech, a rhetorical expression of the republican creed, and the republican expression of a rhetorical creed. The address thus constitutes its own theory of rhetoric; it is an exemplification of republican virtue, the conception, design, and delivery of which was meant to instantiate Jeffersons vision of a new moral and political order.

Edmund Burke's discontents and the interpretation of political culture

The rhetorical action of Burkes classic defense of party is its inducement to see that, by interpreting political culture as he does, reader and author collaborate in the recovery of public virtue. To the extent that Burke is successful, even historically‐distanced readers enter into a process by which we become, simultaneously, interpreters of the text and interpreted by it.

The pastoral voice in John Dickinson's first letter from a farmer in Pennsylvania

John Dickinsons famed Letter appropriates pastoral design and convention for rhetorical ends. Through a close reading of the text, we can discern the ways in which literary idiom lends its force of expression to meet the needs of public controversy. A standard of rhetorical judgment emerges from the text which is both instantiated in the argument and is its chief mode of appeal.

Samuel Danforth's errand into the wilderness and the discourse of arrival in early American culture

This essay explores the way in the experience of arrival is constructed through the resources of language and community. Samuel Danforths sermon “Errand into the Wilderness” provides an exceptionally clear case study of this process. By examining its structural and thematic features, we can identify the rhetorical action by which arrival is made meaningful as a force in the shaping of cultural identity.

Edmund Burke's "Letter to a Noble Lord": A Textual Study in Political Philosophy and Rhetorical Action.

The enduring importance of Edmund Burke to the study of public address may be attributed to his capacity for conducting political philosophy through the conventional genres of rhetoric. This achievement, however, has led to a bifurcation, in which Burke is appropriated as a philosopher of politics or as a rhetorician of expedience. This essay approaches Burkes thought as it is constituted rhetorically, and may thus serve as a corrective to this tradition. By examining in detail Burkes Letter to a Noble Lord, we are led to see in Burkes rhetoric an over‐riding concern for the alignment of principle with public action; thus situated, the Letter provides an excellent opportunity to see how theoretical precepts may be activated with the constraints of individual will and human community.

Counter‐science: African American historians and the critique of ethnology in nineteenth‐century America

The intersections between social and scientific definitions of race were never so con‐spicious nor so consequential as in the nineteenth century. And never was this more true than when such definitions were made to apply to African Americans. We have a scholarship of considerable depth detailing the ways in which African Americans were subjected to the terms of racial science; we need now to ask how those terms were resisted, by whom, and through which rhetorical resources. This essay examines how postbellum African American historians contested racial science and constructed a rhetoric of vindication by appropriating certain scientific claims even as they asserted extra‐scientific grounds for full citizenship rights.

Rhetorical Criticism and the Challenges of Bilateral Argument

To assume editorial responsibilities for Philosophy & Rhetoric after Henry W. Johnstone was to have assumed rather a lot. He was, for starters, a philospher, and I am not. This much appeared to bother Henry not a bit, and in fact it proved the occasion of many productive discussions and facilitated my apprenticeship in ways for which I am still grateful. By trade a rhetorical critic, I was particularly interested in what might be called philosophical style, and in what sense that style might differentiate itself from modes of expression that characterize my disciplinary conventions. Pressed on the subject, Henry observed that one such distinction turned on our respective ways of initiating an argument. Philosophers, he said, start their arguments in mid-sentence. Now that is a curious thing to say, even by Henrys standards, and I have dwelt on it frequently in the years since his passing. At first I thought he must be referring to the various stratagems with which scholars inaugurate a line of thinking?the appeals to established literature, the staking of terrain within a crowded field of commentary, the documentary requirements that can burden the opening of a case nearly unto death. And indeed there is something to this, as any quick comparison will attest: let us recall first the manner in which most essays in the humanities begin, and turn then to Johnstones own: