This rhetorical criticism of spoken discourse examines Ronald Reagan's polished attempts to persuade the public on economic matters. Amos Kiewe and Davis Houck examine the substance, style, and developmental pattern of Reagan's rhetoric on economic matters and discuss how that rhetoric informed the president's views on other issues. This book demonstrates how rhetorical forces can play a significant role in shaping and selling economic policy.
Kiewe and Houck employ a variety of theoretical perspectives for their longitudinal study of Ronald Reagan's economic discourse, beginning with the former actor/President's Hollywood years. Their analysis of close to a hundred speeches provides a chronological account of the character and development of Reagan's economic rhetoric (as opposed to a critique of its effectiveness). Synthesizing the strategies, self-contradictions, shifts, influences, and patterns in Reagan's economic discourse, Kiewe and Houck conclude that Reagan's economic discourse heavily influenced his views and rhetoric on foreign policy, national defense, the environment, and other issues--Reagan saw the world through economic lenses. This study is valuable to political scientists, economists, and scholars of rhetoric.

A Shining City on a Hill: Ronald Reagan's Economic Rhetoric, 1951-1989 (Praeger Series in Political Communication)

Business & Money

Houck, Davis W.

Kiewe, Amos

Economics

Praeger

This new anthology rounds out Ronald Reagan's rhetorical persona and fills a major gap in the literature about the man by offering an unbiased and a multi-dimensional picture of his public speeches during all phases of his political life. The 52 speech texts are arranged, with short introductions, into six topical chapters covering his Hollywood years, his eight years as governor of California, his presidential campaigns of 1976 and 1980, and his two terms as president. This compact reference will be handy for professionals and students at all levels who are looking for a well-rounded collection of both obscure and well-known speeches which offers Reagan's views on major issues at different times throughout his career. The short volume is suitable for college, university, professional, and public libraries.This representative collection shows Ronald Reagan speaking as an actor, an ideologue, and a pragmatic politician, illustrating his diverse communication styles. The anthology contains both good and bad speeches--some that are famous and others that are little-known--and includes patriotic messages, views on citizenship, politics, and governance and on important issues at different stages in his career. This handy reference is uncompromising in its impartial selection of speeches. A short bibliography points to major sources and important studies, and a full index makes the reference completely accessible.

Actor, Ideologue, Politician: The Public Speeches of Ronald Reagan

Biographies & Memoirs

Greenwood

Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer (Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series)

Review\nIn this moving and gripping account, Davis W. Houck expertly unveils the complexity of historical memory surrounding the 1964 Freedom Summer Project. In Houck’s very skilled hands, Black Bodies in the River takes the reader on a difficult, but essential, journey that reveals the tensions between who we remember as a society―and who we forget. This brilliantly conceived book is a powerful indictment of racist violence and its enduring legacy in the United States. -- Keisha N. Blain, coeditor of Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019 and author of Until I am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America\nBlack Bodies in the River is an extraordinary and riveting look at one of the most awakening moments in civil rights history that shocked a nation. Separating fact from fiction, Houck's rhetorical analysis of a widely spread urban legend that surrounds Freedom Summer is a tour de force to be reckoned with. Readers will be captivated and enlightened as the inconvenient truth unfolds. -- Keith A. Beauchamp, filmmaker of The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till\nIn this book Houck does the nearly impossible: gives voice and story to the pervasive menace of things that cannot be known or seen, merely felt and feared. He makes the hidden history of the South―of Mississippi itself―become fact and vision. This is an essential work of scholarship and humanity. -- Wright Thompson, author of The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business\nA master storyteller, Houck has jumped headlong into the much-reported and historicized 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi with a brilliant and critical twist―interrogating the truth behind the reported discovery of up to two dozen nameless Black bodies in rivers, bayous, and back roads during the FBI’s search for the corpses of three murdered civil rights workers―two white and one Black. We follow Houck as he digs deep into archives, revisits old and new interviews, and walks the landscape to reveal the complicated forces that shape the history and memory of that summer, and the real violence and the spectre of it that birthed a movement. Why does that matter? We feel satisfied to repeatedly laud the three martyrs while misleadingly invoking faceless Black bodies. Why can't we, Houck asks, tell an authentic story and hold fast to the richer, deeper truth? An extraordinary book! -- Kate Clifford Larson, author of Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer\nNearly 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 infamous deaths of these activists dominate not just the history but also the public memory of the Mississippi Summer Project.\nBeginning in the late 1970s, however, movement veterans challenged this central narrative with the shocking claim that during the search for Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, the FBI and other law enforcement personnel discovered many unidentified Black bodies in Mississippi’s swamps, rivers, and bayous. This claim has evolved in subsequent years as activists, journalists, filmmakers, and scholars have continued to repeat it, and the number of supposed Black bodies―never identified―has grown from five to more than two dozen.\nIn Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer, author Davis W. Houck sets out to answer two questions: Were Black bodies discovered that summer? And why has the shocking claim only grown in the past several decades―despite evidence to the contrary? In other words, what rhetorical work does the Black bodies claim do, and with what audiences?\nHouck’s story begins in the murky backwaters of the Mississippi River and the discovery of the bodies of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, murdered on May 2, 1964, by the Ku Klux Klan. He pivots next to the Council of Federated Organization’s voter registration efforts in Mississippi

History

Americas

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

Review\nIn this moving and gripping account, Davis W. Houck expertly unveils the complexity of historical memory surrounding the 1964 Freedom Summer Project. In Houck’s very skilled hands, Black Bodies in the River takes the reader on a difficult, but essential, journey that reveals the tensions between who we remember as a society―and who we forget. This brilliantly conceived book is a powerful indictment of racist violence and its enduring legacy in the United States. -- Keisha N. Blain, coeditor of Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019 and author of Until I am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America\nBlack Bodies in the River is an extraordinary and riveting look at one of the most awakening moments in civil rights history that shocked a nation. Separating fact from fiction, Houck's rhetorical analysis of a widely spread urban legend that surrounds Freedom Summer is a tour de force to be reckoned with. Readers will be captivated and enlightened as the inconvenient truth unfolds. -- Keith A. Beauchamp, filmmaker of The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till\nIn this book Houck does the nearly impossible: gives voice and story to the pervasive menace of things that cannot be known or seen, merely felt and feared. He makes the hidden history of the South―of Mississippi itself―become fact and vision. This is an essential work of scholarship and humanity. -- Wright Thompson, author of The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business\nA master storyteller, Houck has jumped headlong into the much-reported and historicized 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi with a brilliant and critical twist―interrogating the truth behind the reported discovery of up to two dozen nameless Black bodies in rivers, bayous, and back roads during the FBI’s search for the corpses of three murdered civil rights workers―two white and one Black. We follow Houck as he digs deep into archives, revisits old and new interviews, and walks the landscape to reveal the complicated forces that shape the history and memory of that summer, and the real violence and the spectre of it that birthed a movement. Why does that matter? We feel satisfied to repeatedly laud the three martyrs while misleadingly invoking faceless Black bodies. Why can't we, Houck asks, tell an authentic story and hold fast to the richer, deeper truth? An extraordinary book! -- Kate Clifford Larson, author of Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer\nNearly 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 infamous deaths of these activists dominate not just the history but also the public memory of the Mississippi Summer Project.\nBeginning in the late 1970s, however, movement veterans challenged this central narrative with the shocking claim that during the search for Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, the FBI and other law enforcement personnel discovered many unidentified Black bodies in Mississippi’s swamps, rivers, and bayous. This claim has evolved in subsequent years as activists, journalists, filmmakers, and scholars have continued to repeat it, and the number of supposed Black bodies—never identified—has grown from five to more than two dozen.\nIn Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer, author Davis W. Houck sets out to answer two questions: Were Black bodies discovered that summer? And why has the shocking claim only grown in the past several decades—despite evidence to the contrary? In other words, what rhetorical work does the Black bodies claim do, and with what audiences?\nHouck’s story begins in the murky backwaters of the Mississippi River and the discovery of the bodies of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, murdered on May 2, 1964, by the Ku Klux Klan. He pivots next to the Council of Federated Organization’s voter registration efforts in Mississippi

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 public confidence was vital to recovery. They differed markedly, of course, in their ability to restore that confidence. Roosevelt’s advantage lay not just in his position in the changing of the guard. He employed a skilled staff of speech writers, and he had the negative example of Hoover before him from which to plot rhetorical strategies that would be more effective. In Rhetoric as Currency, Houck uses the historical context of the Great Depression to explore the relationship of rhetoric to the economy and specifically economic recovery. He closely analyzes Hoover’s rhetorical corpus from March 4, 1929, through March 3, 1933, and Roosevelt’s from January 3, 1930, through June 16, 1933. This longitudinal study allows him to understand rhetoric as a process rather than a series of isolated, discrete products. Houck first examines Hoover’s presidential rhetoric, tracing its paradoxes and the radical shift that occurred in the final year of his administration. The Depression, in his rhetoric, was a foe to be vanquished by an optimistic Christian and civic faith, not federal legislation. Once he determined that federal intervention was indeed required, he could not return to the dais; rather, he relied on an antagonistic press to carry his message of confidence. Abdicating the rhetorical pulpit, he left it in the hands of those opposed to him. Houck then studies the economic rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt as governor, candidate, president-elect, and finally president. He traces the key similarities and differences in Roosevelt's economic rhetoric with particular attention to an embodied economics, wherein recovery was premised less on mental optimism than a physical, active confidence.

Rhetoric as Currency: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Great Depression (Volume 4) (Presidential Rhetoric and Political Communication)

Texas A&M University Press

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." These are some of the most famous, the most quoted, and the best remembered words in American political history. They seem to be a natural expression of American democratic will, yet these words from Franklin Roosevelt's first inaugural address had an actual author who struggled with how best to express that thought - and it was not the new president. In this book on the crafting of this crucial speech, Davis W. Houck leads the reader from its negative, mechanical, and Hooverian first draft through its final revision, its delivery, and the responses of those who were inspired by it during those troubled times. Houck's analysis, dramatic and at points riveting, focuses on three themes: how the speech came to be written; an explication of the text itself; and its reception. Drawing on the writings and memories of several people who were present in the crowd at the inauguration, Houck shows how powerfully the new president's speech affected those who were there or who heard it on the radio. Some were so moved by Roosevelt's delivery that they would have been willing to make him a dictator, and many believed such inspired words could have come only from a divine source. Houck then flashes back to the final year of the 1932 presidential campaign to show how Raymond Moley, the principal architect of the address, came to be trusted by Roosevelt to craft this important speech. Houck traces the relationships of Moley with Roosevelt and Roosevelt's influential confidante, Louis Howe, who was responsible for important changes in the speech's later drafts, including the famous aphorism.

FDR and Fear Itself: The First Inaugural Address (The Library of Presidential Rhetoric)

Texas A & M Univ Pr

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." These are some of the most famous, the most quoted, and the best remembered words in American political history. They seem to be a natural expression of American democratic will, yet these words from Franklin Roosevelt's first inaugural address had an actual author who struggled with how best to express that thought—and it wasn’t the new president. In this innovative book on the crafting of this crucial speech, Davis W. Houck leads the reader from its negative, mechanical, and Hooverian first draft through its final revision, its delivery, and the responses of those who were inspired by it during those troubled times. Houck’s analysis, dramatic and at points riveting, focuses on three themes: how the speech came to be written; an explication of the text itself; and its reception. Drawing on the writings and memories of several people who were present in the crowd at the inauguration, Houck shows how powerfully the new president’s speech affected those who were there or who heard it on the radio. Some were so moved by Roosevelt’s delivery that they would have been willing to make him a dictator, and many believed such inspired words could have come only from a divine source. Houck then flashes back to the final year of the 1932 presidential campaign to show how Raymond Moley, the principal architect of the address, came to be trusted by Roosevelt to craft this important speech. Houck traces the relationships of Moley with Roosevelt and Roosevelt’s influential confidante, Louis Howe, who was responsible for important changes in the speech’s later drafts, including the famous aphorism. Although the book focuses primarily on the speech and its drafting, Houck also offers telling glimpses of Roosevelt's complex relationship with his wife, who dreaded her new duties as First Lady, and his deep, personal dislike of Herbert Hoover, all while conveying a strong sense of the urgency of the times. The text of this compelling address is provided in its entirety so that students and others may experience for themselves the full power of the rhetoric.

FDR and Fear Itself: The First Inaugural Address (Library of Presidential Rhetoric)

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 words he chose to portray himself and his policies as powerful and health-giving, and the methods he used to maximize the appearance of physical strength. Drawing on never-before-used primary sources, they explore how Roosevelt and his advisors attacked his most difficult rhetorical bind: how to address his fitness for office without invoking his disability. They examine his broad strategies, as well as the speeches Roosevelt delivered during his political comeback after polio struck, to understand how he overcame the whispering campaign against him in 1928 and 1932. The compelling narrative Houck and Kiewe offer here is one of struggle against physical disability and cultural prejudice by one of our nation's most powerful leaders. Ultimately, it is a story of triumph and courage—one that reveals a master politician's understanding of the body politic in the most fundamental of ways.

FDR's Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (Volume 8) (Presidential Rhetoric and Political Communication)

Community & Culture

Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press

Employing never-before-used historical materials, the authors of Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press reveal how Mississippi journalists both expressed and shaped public opinion in the aftermath of the 1955 Emmett Till murder. Combing small-circulation weeklies as well as large-circulation dailies, Davis W. Houck and Matthew A. Grindy analyze the rhetoric at work as the state attempted to grapple with a brutal, small-town slaying. Initially coverage tended to be sympathetic to Till, but when the case became a clarion call for civil rights and racial justice in Mississippi, journalists reacted.Newspapers both reported on the Till investigation and editorialized on its protagonists. Within days, the Till case transcended the specifics of a murder in the Delta. Coverage wrestled with such complex cultural matters as the role of the press, class, gender, and geography in the determination of guilt and innocence.Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press provides a careful examination of the courtroom testimony given in Sumner, Mississippi, and the trial's conclusion as reported by the state's newspapers. The book closes with an analysis of how Mississippi has attempted to come to terms with its racially troubled past by, in part, memorializing Emmett Till in and around the Delta.

Arts & Photography

Grindy, Matthew A.

Music

“Smart, engaging, irreverent, and funny – abounding with the requisite treatments of traditional public speaking and classical rhetoric, while absolutely electric with pop cultural examples from the 80s and 90s to the 2000s and today.”
- Dr. Jason Edward Black, Chair and Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte
 “Public Speaking in the 21st Century distinguishes itself among existing textbooks through its born digital format, as well as its fresh and riveting content.”
- Dr. Maegan Parker Brooks, Assistant Professor of Civic Communication and Media at Willamette University
 “[Public Speaking in the 21st Century] is direct, conversational, colloquial, and fast-paced, rich with cultural allusions and disciplinary lore, frank and advisory in telling students what is most likely to work as they practice the ancient art of public speaking.”
- Dr. Thomas W. Benson, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric Emeritus at Pennsylvania State University

Public Speaking in the 21st Century: Instructor's Annotated Edition

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Flip Learning

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Houck, Davis W.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Houck, Davis W.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Houck, Davis W.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Shining City on a Hill: Ronald Reagan's Economic Rhetoric, 1951-1989 (Praeger Series in Political Communication)

Actor, Ideologue, Politician: The Public Speeches of Ronald Reagan

Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer (Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series)

Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer (Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series)

Rhetoric as Currency: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Great Depression (Volume 4) (Presidential Rhetoric and Political Communication)

FDR and Fear Itself: The First Inaugural Address (The Library of Presidential Rhetoric)

FDR and Fear Itself: The First Inaugural Address (Library of Presidential Rhetoric)

FDR's Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (Volume 8) (Presidential Rhetoric and Political Communication)

Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press

Public Speaking in the 21st Century: Instructor's Annotated Edition