Rhetoric & Public Affairs

Frederick Douglass, Ring Compositions, and the Peculiar Memory of Abraham Lincoln

Bjorn F. Stillion Southard — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Frederick Douglass’s 1876 speech at the dedication of the Freedmen’s Memorial in Washington, D.C. has been lauded for its complexity and nuance. In that speech, Douglass praised and criticized the deceased President Lincoln for his handling of enslavement. This essay argues that Douglass’s speech constructs a peculiar memory of Lincoln through the use of the rhetorical form known as a ring composition. This form, enacted with particular influence from Black rhetorical traditions and experiences, expressed the complex feelings that Douglass and other Black Americans felt about the murdered president. By exploring the form of the ring composition, this essay helps to explain the rhetorical forces underlying Douglass’s speech. Additionally, this essay illustrates the utility of ring compositions in the study of rhetorical form, race, and memory.

Just the Right Thing: Decorum and Ethos in the Apollo 8 Genesis Reading Controversy

Allyson Gross, Jenell Johnson — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

On Christmas Eve, 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 read from the book of Genesis during an internationally televised broadcast seen by nearly one billion people. In the days and weeks that followed the reading, the astronauts and NASA were widely praised by the public but excoriated by a vocal few. Following legal threats against NASA by the atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, thousands of Americans wrote into their local newspapers in support of the reading. In this essay, we conduct a reading of these responses for how they framed the reading as appropriate, decorous, and “just the right thing” in the as-yet unprecedented situation of the first lunar flyby. While decorum and propriety are often understood in terms of a speech’s fidelity to existing rhetorical conventions, we find that responses to the Genesis reading instead framed its decorousness as a function of the particular ethos of the Apollo 8 astronauts.

Child Workers Defining their Relational Agency in the Bolivian Código Niña, Niño y Adolescente

Elizabeth Gardner — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Bolivia captured international headlines (and a bit of notoriety) in 2014 when it became the first country in the world to relegalize child labor for ten-year-olds. Originally, the legislature was going to raise the minimum age for child labor from fourteen to sixteen to align with the International Labour Organization’s recommendations, but as the Parliament deliberated, they encountered seemingly unlikely opposition, child workers themselves. Child workers led what the New York Times labeled the “first ever demonstration by child laborers in Bolivia,” and their advocacy shifted Parliament’s trajectory and secured legislative change. This article examines their activism, paying attention to children’s voices that are frequently ignored. By examining discourse from the Bolivian Union of Child and Adolescent Workers, local Bolivian news outlets, and international media coverage, I argue that Bolivian child workers privileged their relational agency by redefining childhood, the construct that traditionally robs them of a voice. They accomplished this redefinition by using the argumentative strategy of dissociation to combat the incompatibilities mapped onto their position as child speakers. Through this strategy, the child workers recast an Andean childhood in relationship to a Western childhood around the notions of practical needs, work, protection, and education.

Forging Peace by Threatening Violence

Daniel Overton — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

In 1906, Eugene V. Debs published the most infamous editorial of his career, entitled “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” Addressing the murder charges against prominent Western Federation of Miners leadership, Debs mobilized threats and rhetorical violence to provoke attention to reportedly unjust legal practices. “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” remains something of a puzzling outlier in Debs's rhetorical canon, for despite his established legacy of peaceful protest and his preference for education toward gradual change, he announced a bold plan for violent revolt and immediate upheaval. Through an analysis of “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” in context, I argue Debs invoked rhetorical violence in the service of ultimately peaceful outcomes, suggesting a theory of rhetorical violence geared toward nonviolent social change. This study contributes a recovery of the Haywood-Moyer-Pettibone murder controversy for rhetorical scholars, while providing an expanded theoretical understanding of rhetorical violence to explain Debs’s puzzling but successful navigation of an uncharacteristic rhetorical strategy.

The Unlikely World of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Solidarity across Alabama, the United Kingdom and South Africa. By Cole S. Manley. Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2021; pp. 122. $14.95 Paperback.

Margaret Murphy — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Review of Sensitive Rhetorics. By Kendall Gerdes. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2024; $50.00 hardcover; $50.00 eBook.

Caddie Alford — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Book review of

Sensitive Rhetorics. By Kendall Gerdes. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2024; $50.00 hardcover; $50.00 eBook.

The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO

Felicity Sena Dogbatse — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Political Mourning: Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy

Kimberley Hannah-Prater — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500