American Rhetoric from Roosevelt to Reagan

Download or read book American Rhetoric from Roosevelt to Reagan written by Halford Ross Ryan and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The student of contemporary American public address, rhetorical criticism, and persuasion needs two fundamental kinds of original materials upon which to build a successful mastery of these disciplines. I believe that the student can begin to study these disciplines by scrutinizing texts of speeches. But which speeches should one study? From many useful criteria, I chose two that somewhat overlap. First, I selected significant or standard political speakers. I make the word "political" go beyond mere party politics and use the word in its original and wider Greek sense of the polis: the concerns of the state. Second, I selected speeches which can be treated as examples of advocacy or debate on important issues of the American polis. -- pg. xi.