Every president since Franklin Roosevelt has confronted civil rights issues during his tenure in the White House, and most have faced intense demands to speak publicly about the nation's racial problems and possible solutions. Indeed, modern American presidents have become a major focal point for the civil rights struggle.
In "The Modern Presidency and Civil Rights, " Garth E. Pauley examines modern presidents' communicative and symbolic involvement in these matters, focusing on four crucial speeches, the circumstances surrounding them, and their effect on public attitudes and policy....

Hoover, the president of economic depression; Roosevelt the president of recovery--the public images of these two men are so firmly fixed that they offer shorthand ways to talk about the era we know as the Great Depression. Yet their views on economic policy for taking the country out of its greatest economic calamity were not so different as is often supposed.
Indeed, the famed journalist Walter Lippmann once claimed that Roosevelt's legislative measures represented "a continuous evolution of the Hoover measures." Moreover, both Hoover and Roosevelt shared a Keynesian conviction that...

When the stakes of public words and actions are global and permanent, and especially when they involve war and peace, can we afford not to seek their meaning? For three decades, Francis Beer has pioneered the effort to discover, describe, and connect pieces of the complex puzzle of war, peace, their interrelationship, and their causes.
In this volume, Beer (joined by colleagues as co-authors of some chapters) examines the cognitive, behavioral, and linguistic dimensions of war and peace. Language, he shows, is important because it mediates between thought and action. It expresses beliefs...

Franklin Roosevelt instinctively understood that a politician unable to control his own body would be perceived as unable to control the body politic. He took care to hide his polio-induced lameness both visually and verbally. Through his speeches--and his physical bearing when delivering them--he tried to project robust health for himself while imputing disability, weakness, and even disease onto his political opponents and their policies.
In "FDR's Body Politics: ""The"" Rhetoric of Disability, " Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe analyze the silences surrounding Roosevelt's disability, the...

"I wish there were some great orator who would go about and make men drunk with this spirit of selfsacrifice . . . whose tongue might every day carry abroad the gold accents of that creative age in which we were born a nation; accents which would ring like tones of reassurance around the whole circle of the globe."
These rousing words of academician Woodrow Wilson foreshadowed the role oratory would play in his own political career--a career that saw him triumph on his domestic agenda largely through his inspirational message but fail in his most cherished dream, the League of Nations,...

The environment figures prominently in American political debate of the twentieth century. Issues of wilderness and wetlands preservation, clean air and clean water, and the sustainable use of natural resources attract passionate advocacy and demands for national as well as local action. Presidents since Theodore Roosevelt have addressed these issues, rhetorically (though not always prominently) in their public addresses and pragmatically in their policies and appointments to pertinent positions.
"Green Talk in the White House" gathers an array of approaches to studying environmental...

The rise of the media presidency through radio and television broadcasts has heightened the visibility and importance of presidential speeches in determining the effectiveness and popularity of the President of the United States. Not surprisingly, this development has also witnessed the rise of professional speechwriters to craft the words the chief executive would address to the nation. Yet, as this volume of expert analyses graphically demonstrates, the reliance of individual presidents on their speechwriters has varied with the rhetorical skill of the officeholder himself, his managerial...

The environment figures prominently in American political debate of the twentieth century. Issues of wilderness and wetlands preservation, clean air and clean water, and the sustainable use of natural resources attract passionate advocacy and demands for national as well as local action. Presidents since Theodore Roosevelt have addressed these issues, rhetorically (though not always prominently) in their public addresses and pragmatically in their policies and appointments to pertinent positions.

Green Talk in the White House gathers an array of approaches to studying environmental...