Rhetoric
The Summer of 2020
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, protests broke out in Minneapolis and quickly spread across the United States. National unrest led to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement ...
Terror and Truth
Stephen A. King and Roger Davis Gatchet examine how Mississippi confronts its history of racial violence and injustice through civil rights tourism. Mississippi’s civil rights memorials include a vast ...
The Rhetorical Road to Brown v. Board of Education
As early as 1947, Black parents in rural South Carolina began seeking equal educational opportunities for their children. After two unsuccessful lawsuits, these families directly challenged legally mandated ...
Visions of Invasion
Visions of Invasion: Alien Affects, Cinema, and Citizenship in Settler Colonies explores how the US government mobilizes media and surveillance technologies to operate a highly networked, multidimensional ...
The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner
Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915) was a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of America’s earliest Black activists and social reformers, and an outspoken proponent of emigration. In ...
Rethinking Racial Uplift
In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the Talented Tenth in an influential essay of the same name. The concept exalted college-educated Blacks who Du Bois believed could provide the race with the guidance ...
Authenticating Whiteness
In Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars, Rachel E. Dubrofsky explores the idea that popular media implicitly portrays whiteness as credible, trustworthy, familiar, and honest, and ...
Black Bodies in the River
Nearly sixty years after Freedom Summer, its events—especially the lynching of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner—stand out as a critical episode of the civil rights movement. The ...
Laugh Lines
Humor in recent American poetry has been largely dismissed or ignored by scholars, due in part to a staid reverence for the lyric. Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century ...
Fear, Hate, and Victimhood
When Donald Trump announced his campaign for president in 2015, journalists, historians, and politicians alike attempted to compare his candidacy to that of Governor George Wallace. Like Trump, Wallace, ...