In an era when the value of the humanities and qualitative inquiry has been questioned in academia and beyond, Making the Case is an engaging and timely collection that brings together a veritable who’s who of public address scholars to illustrate the power of case-based scholarly argument and to demonstrate how critical inquiry into a specific moment speaks to general contexts and theories. Providing both a theoretical framework and a wealth of historically situated texts, Making the Case spans from Homeric Greece to twenty-first-century America. The authors examine the dynamic interplay of texts and their concomitant rhetorical situations by drawing on a number of case studies, including controversial constitutional arguments put forward by activists and presidents in the nineteenth century, inventive economic pivots by Franklin Roosevelt and Alan Greenspan, and the rhetorical trajectory and method of Barack Obama.
ContentsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsReflections on Making the Case | David ZarefskyThe Beginnings of Oratorical Consciousness: Restarting Time in Homer’s Odyssey, The Telemachy | G. Thomas GoodnightLysander Spooner’s The Unconstitutionality of Slavery: A Case Study in Constitutional Hermeneutics, Ethical Argument, and Practical Reason | James JasinskiKind Persuasion: Lincoln’s Temperance Address and the Ethos of Civic Friendship | Michael LeffAndrew Johnson’s Fight for States’ Rights on the Battlements of the Constitution | Karlyn Kohrs CampbellNo End Save Victory: FDR and the End of Isolationism, 1936–1941 | John M. MurphyIraq as a Representative Anecdote for Leadership: Barack Obama’s Address on the Fifth Anniversary of the Iraq War | Denise M. BostdorffBarack Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address: Narrative Signature and Interpretation | Martin J. MedhurstTo Exist, You Need an Ideology: Alan Greenspan on Markets, Crisis, and Democracy | Robert AsenContributors
