This course examines American political rhetoric in its broadest sense as the art of political persuasion and civic education. Surveying the field from the Founders through Barack Obama, we will engage in a careful reading of the speeches and writings of leading statesmen and literati, including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, FDR, JFK, Robert Frost, and Ronald Reagan.
Instructors: Ken Masugi teaches government in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. He is the co-author of Democracy in California: Politics and Government in the Golden State, the editor of Interpreting Tocqueville's "Democracy in America", and co-editor of five other books on American political thought. Colleen Sheehan is Associate Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. She is the author of James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government, and co-editor of Friends of the Constitution: The Writings of the "Other" Federalists, 1787-1788.