This comprehensive introductory textbook gives students the framework and tools to become great debaters and use those skills to further civil and respectful responses on contentious topics. Focusing on core concepts and skills of research, reasoning, and argumentation with a special focus on debate rhythms, the book builds students' ability to express ideas and respectfully dissent, ultimately improving their individual resilience in adverse circumstances and encouraging the emergence of ...

James Farmer Jr.: The Great Debater provides a rhetorical and biographical guide to how the American Civil Rights Movement came into being. It details James Farmer Jr.’s intellectual emergence as a young debater at an HBCU in Marshall, Texas and ultimately chronicles how this led to the emergence of the first non-violent sit-in against segregation in 1942 in Chicago. Farmer was a key founder of the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE] that pioneered the non-violent strategies that would late...

In this book, Ben Voth argues that the centennial of the modern presidency embodied in the rhetoric of presidents Wilson, Harding and Coolidge provides an opportunity to re-examine our conventional understanding of U.S. presidents and presidential rankings. In particular, this book focuses on Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge’s rhetoric surrounding women’s suffrage and the political treatment of Black Americans. Voth demonstrates that ideological considerations elevated Wilson too high in pres...

The tenth edition of Political Campaign Communication: Principles and Practices provides a clear and thorough survey of the strategic decisions vital to the success of contemporary political campaigns. The authors draw on a host of examples involving political campaigns at local, statewide, and national levels to illustrate all aspects of campaign communication, from forms of public address to buttons, yard-signs, and billboards, to traditional media and the use of internet and social medi...

Studies of Communication in the 2020 Presidential Campaign explores a wide range of communication elements, themes, and topics of the 2020 presidential election. The introduction provides a brief snapshot summarizing the role of more traditional elements of campaign communication as well as the newer elements of social media and journalistic practices that transformed the political landscape in 2020. Each chapter serves as a stand-alone study focusing on the role and function of c...

Debate as Global Pedagogy: Rwanda Rising illustrates that the teaching of debate offers an ideal educational approach for the prevention and remediation of genocide. As the antithesis of propaganda, debate and argument instruction promotes the critical thinking necessary to resist processes of propaganda that enable injustice and human rights abuses. Case studies of argumentation instruction and deliberative forums worldwide demonstrate how environments of discursive complexity can be fost...

Genocide represents one of the deadliest scourges of the human experience. Communication practices provide the key missing ingredient toward preventing and ending this intensely symbolic activity. The Rhetoric of Genocide: Death as a Text reveals how strategic communication silences make this tragedy probable, and how a greater social ethic for communication openness repels and ends this great evil. Careful analysis of practical historical figures, such as the great debater James Farmer Jr...

This book examines perhaps the most contentious election in modern US history—the 2016 United States presidential election. It is unique in its discussion of a wide range of issues affecting the news media coverage of the election, coming from an equally diverse range of intellectual perspectives including the rhetorical, social-scientific, communication studies, and media studies. With eleven chapters grounded in hard evidence and communication theory, The 2016 American Presidential Campa...

Presidential campaigns are our national conversations – the widespread and complex communication of issues, images, social reality, and personas. Political communication specialists break down the 2012 presidential campaign and go beyond the quantitative facts, electoral counts, and poll results of the election, to make sense of the “political bits” of communication that comprise our voting choices. The contributors look at the early campaign period, the nomination process and conventions,...

To date, there are only a couple dozen or so books specifically about the Presidency of George W. Bush. Political operatives, members of the media, and former administration officials have written most of the volumes. Additionally, the early books on the Bush presidency focus on the various aspects and dimensions of the “War on Terror.” In essence, these studies challenge the justification of our deployment, the “Bush doctrine” and the assumptions of nation building. Few volumes focus on h...

To simply say the 2008 presidential election was historic seems like an understatement. The election was unique in many ways beyond the selection of the nation's first African-American as President. The drama of the election was also heightened by the historic nomination battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The contest generated issues of race and gender throughout the campaign, as did the candidacy of Sarah Palin as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee. And John McCain bro...

Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on factsIn what could be the timeliest book of the year, Rauch aims to arm his readers to engage with reason in an age of illiberalism.-*Newsweek*A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceDisinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little...