Table of contents
Introduction: The field of political argumentation
Part I. Early American political argumentation
From “conflict” to “Constitutional question”: Transformations in early American public discourse
John Tyler and the rhetoric of the accidental presidency
Debating slavery by proxy: The Texas annexation controversy
Henry Clay and the election of 1844: The limits of a rhetoric of compromise
Part II. Abraham Lincoln’s political argumentation
Consistency and change in Lincoln’s rhetoric about equality
“Public sentiment is everything”: Lincoln’s view of political persuasion
Lincoln and the House Divided: Launching a national political career
The Lincoln-Douglas debates revisited: The evolution of public argument
Philosophy and rhetoric in Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address
Part III. Argumentation and American foreign policy
The self-sealing rhetoric of John Foster Dulles
Foreign policy as persuasion: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam
George W. Bush discovers rhetoric: September 20, 2001 and the U.S. response to terrorism
Making the case for war: Colin Powell at the United Nations
The U.S. and the world: The rhetorical dimensions of Obama’s foreign policy
Part IV. American political argumentation since the 1960s
The Great Society as a rhetorical proposition
Lyndon Johnson redefines “equal opportunity”: The beginnings of affirmative action
Civil rights and civil conflict: Presidential communication in crisis
Martin Luther King, the American Dream, and Vietnam: A collision of rhetorical trajectories
Reagan’s safety net for the truly needy: The rhetorical uses of definition
Obama’s Lincoln: Uses of the argument from historical analogy
Index
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