Examines the relationship of civic discourse to built environments through a case study of the Cabrini Green urban revitalization project in Chicago.

This rhetorical criticism of spoken discourse examines Ronald Reagan's polished attempts to persuade the public on economic matters. Amos Kiewe and Davis Houck examine the substance, style, and developmental pattern of Reagan's rhetoric on economic matters and discuss how that rhetoric informed the president's views on other issues. This book demonstrates how rhetorical forces can play a significant role in shaping and selling economic policy. Kiewe and Houck employ a variety of theoretical perspectives for their longitudinal study of Ronald Reagan's economic discourse, beginning with the former actor/President's Hollywood years. Their analysis of close to a hundred speeches provides a chronological account of the character and development of Reagan's economic rhetoric (as opposed to a critique of its effectiveness). Synthesizing the strategies, self-contradictions, shifts, influences, and patterns in Reagan's economic discourse, Kiewe and Houck conclude that Reagan's economic discourse heavily influenced his views and rhetoric on foreign policy, national defense, the environment, and other issues--Reagan saw the world through economic lenses. This study is valuable to political scientists, economists, and scholars of rhetoric.

Though we live in a time when memory seems to be losing its hold on communities, memory remains central to personal, communal, and national identities. And although popular and public discourses from speeches to films invite a shared sense of the past, official sites of memory such as memorials, museums, and battlefields embody unique rhetorical principles. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside acci

'Moral character, so to say, constitutes the most effective means of proof.' In ancient Greece, rhetoric was at the centre of public life. Many writers attempted to provide manuals to help improve debating skills, but it was not until Aristotle produced The Art of Rhetoric in the 4th century bc that the subject had a true masterpiece. As he considered the role of emotion, reason, and morality in speech, Aristotle created essential guidelines for argument and prose style that would influence writers for more than two millennia. Brilliantly explained and carefully reasoned, The Art of Rhetoric remains as relevant today as it was in the assemblies of ancient Athens.

This book explores how ephemeral and displaced public memories continue to linger and circulate around the National Mall in Washington, DC. Chapters examine unrecognized historical events on the Mall, selective interpretations of the past within the Mall’s sites, and places of public memory hiding in plain sight.

Traces the communication strategies of various constituencies in a Chicago neighborhood, offering insights into the challenges that beset diverse urban populations and demonstrating persuasively rhetoric’s power to illuminate and resolve charged conflicts Candice Rai’s Democracy’s Lot is an incisive exploration of the limitations and possibilities of democratic discourse for resolving conflicts in urban communities. Rai roots her study of democratic politics and publics in a range of urban case studies focused on public art, community policing, and urban development. These studies examine the issues that erupted within an ethnically and economically diverse Chicago neighborhood over conflicting visions for a vacant lot called Wilson Yard. Tracing how residents with disparate agendas organized factions and deployed language, symbols, and other rhetorical devices in the struggle over Wilson Yard’s redevelopment and other contested public spaces, Rai demonstrates that rhetoric is not solely a tool of elite communicators, but rather a framework for understanding the agile communication strategies that are improvised in the rough-and-tumble work of democratic life. Wilson Yard, a lot eight blocks north of Wrigley Field in Chicago’s gentrifying Uptown neighborhood, is a diverse enclave of residents enlivened by recent immigrants from Guatemala, Mexico, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. The neighborhood’s North Broadway Street witnesses a daily multilingual hubbub of people from a wide spectrum of income levels, religions, sexual identifications, and interest groups. When a fire left the lot vacant, this divided community projected on Wilson Yard disparate and conflicting aspirations, the resolution of which not only determined the fate of this particular urban space, but also revealed the lot of democracy itself as a process of complex problem-solving. Rai’s detailed study of one block in an iconic American city brings into vivid focus the remarkable challenges that beset democratic urban populations anywhere on the globe—and how rhetoric supplies a framework to understand and resolve those challenges. Based on exhaustive field work, Rai uses rhetorical ethnography to study competing publics, citizenship, and rhetoric in action, exploring “rhetorical invention,” the discovery or development by individuals of the resources or methods of engaging with and persuading others. She builds a case for democratic processes and behaviors based not on reflexive idealism but rather on the hard work and practice of democracy, which must address apathy, passion, conflict, and ambivalence.