religious development of the United States, great orators, standing at the
rostrum, on the stump, and in the pulpit, used words and gestdres to
influence their audiences. Usually striving for the noble, sometimes
achieving the base, they urged their fellow citizens toward a more perfect
Union. The books in this series chronicle and explain the accomplishments
of representative American leaders as orators.

A series of book-length studies on American persuaders honors the
role men and women have played in U.S. history. Previously, if one
desired to assess the impact of a speaker or a speech upon history, the path
was, at best, not well marked and, at worst, littered with obstacles. To be
sure, one might turn to biographies and general histories to learn about an
orator, but for the public address scholar these sources often prove
unhelpful. Rhetorical topics, such as speech invention, style, delivery,
organizational strategies, and persuasive effect, are often treated in passing,
if mentioned at all. Authoritative speech texts are often difficult to locate
and the problem of textual accuracy is frequently encountered. This is
especially true for those figures who spoke one or two hundred years ago,
or for those whose persuasive role, though significant, was secondary to
other leading lights of the age.

Each book in this series is organized to meet the needs of scholars
and students of the history and criticism of American public address. Part
I is a critical analysis of the orator and his or her speeches. Within the
format of a case study, one may expect considerable latitude. For
instance, in a given chapter an author might explicate a single speech or a
group of related speeches, or examine orations that comprise a genre of
rhetoric such as forensic speaking. But the critic's focus remains on the
rhetorical considerations of speaker, speech, occasion, and effect. Part II
contains the texts of the important addresses that are discussed in the
critical analysis that precedes it. To the extent possible, each author has
endeavored to collect authoritative speech texts, which have often been
found through original research in collections of primary source material.
In a few instances, because of the extreme length of a speech, texts have
been edited, but the authors have been careful to delete material that is
least important to the speech, and these deletions have been held to a
minimum.

In each book there is a chronology of major speeches that serves
more purposes than may be apparent at first. Pragmatically, it lists all of
the orator's known speeches and addresses. Places and dates of the
speeches are also listed, although this is information that is sometimes
difficult to determine precisely. But in a wider sense, the chronology
attests to the scope of rhetoric in the United States. Certainly in quantity,
if not always in quality, Americans are historically talkers and listeners.

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