The Political Rhetoric Archive is a searchable collection of speeches, newsprint editorials, letters, government documents, and fragments of speech/text primarily arranged by historical event. The goal of the archive is to provide easy access for any beginning or advanced student of rhetoric, political science, and/or history to the broad rhetorical context surrounding any political event or era.
The Political Rhetoric Archive is focused on moments of rhetorical intervention – those moments in time where humans use language to name, interpret, analyze, and intervene to shift the world as currently constituted, for better or for worse. Therefore, the artifacts included are clustered around moments of beginning, ending, and other radical transformations. The archive also functions as what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as the “heteroglossia” of those moments – the presence and overlapping of many voices in the creation of the intervention. The search function of the archive allows users to examine the effects of multiple voices in a given intervention.
The Political Rhetoric Archive begins with a multitude of entries on the beginning and end of the Civil War. As the collection grows, more events will be added and researchers will be able to compare rhetorical contexts over events and generations.
Researcher Dr. Beth Huber is an Associate Professor of English at Western Carolina University. Her expertise is in Classical and Political Rhetoric.