Historical Speech Research Articles

Editorial backing brown’s vision

THE CURRENT system of funding the NHS is the right one, but there is not enough cash in the system. This is the gist of Chancellor Gordon Brown’s historic speech last week in which he defended the founding principles of the NHS and argued that funding from taxation is even more relevant

Intertextual authority in reported speech: Production media in the Kennedy Smith rape trial

This study examines how intertextuality generates inconsistency through a special type of trial discourse. I analyze how defense attorney and witnesses co-contextualize audio-tapes of historical speech prior to inserting them in the current reporting context — a sequential and metapragmatic negotiation which frames not only the authority but the reception of reported speech during the performance of legal knowledge. My goal is to show how this communicative practice interacts with footing, affect, and linguistic ideology in the naturalization of discursive power and the production of intertextual transparency. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Speech! Speech! You Haven't Heard Nothing Net!

This article provides an overview of Web sites of historical audio recordings. Selected Web sites are reviewed from the standpoint of providing a library of historical speeches. Major sites reviewed include American Memory/The Nation's Forum Collection, the History Channel “Great Speeches,” Oyez, Oyez, Oyez, US History Out Loud, and Doughss: Archives of American Public Address.

The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961.

Guaranteed to keep you up long after prime time, The Box re-creates the old-time TV years through more than three hundred interviews with those who invented, manufactured, advertised, produced, directed, wrote, and acted in them. Their reminiscences are intertwined with a chronological narrative that tells the technological, business, and entertainment stories--from pioneer Philo T. Farnsworth, through the Golden Age of comedy and drama, to FCC chairman Newt Minow's historic speech declaring television a vast wasteland.

Crossing Boundaries: The Genesis of the Township Plays

On 18 June 1954, Port Elizabeth Evening Post published an article by an unknown young local freelance writer recently returned from working his way around world on tramp steamer. The article, entitled Drama of P.E.'s Night School For Adults, attempted to explain to its white South African readers why four nights week, month after month and year after year, over 500 African men and women of all ages attend night school New black township on outskirts of city. To engage Post's readers with subject they obviously knew nothing about, writer simply and effectively dramatized stories of some of these men and women of New Brighton, particular, Philip and Lena. For men like Philip, learning to read and write meant keeping out of trouble, for instance by being able to read notices like Europeans Only. It also meant some alleviation of bewilderment and loneliness of urban life, for instance through enabling him to write letters home to his parents in kraal. For women like Lena, worried about having brought her children into a world of learning to read enabled her to share budding learning, well to buy an occasional tin of something special because she can follow directions on side. The author of this small attempt to convey something of lives and everyday experiences of his fellow South Africans across boundaries of race, class, and gender was twenty-two-year-old Athol Fugard. It sounds patronizing today, but article demonstrates how, from his earliest published writings, Fugard was concerned to acknowledge lives, indeed very existence, of those of his compatriots excluded one way or another from centers of privilege and power his society. Although this concern led him to go on and testify to experiences of lost and discarded whites from Hester and Johnny (in Hello and Goodbye) to Gideon Le Roux (in Playland), it has also involved bearing to experiences of black people, from correspondence student Willie Seopelo (in No-Good Friday) to rural migrant Sizwe dictating letter home (in Sizwe Bansi Is Dead), to--how prophetic name of her New Brighton predecessor--the desperate Lena (in Boesman and Lena), stripped even of consolations of motherhood and belonging township. As I have suggested elsewhere (Resituating), idea of bearing witness, which Fugard has used to describe his motivation since 1968, and which has subsequently been echoed by many critics (myself included) to legitimate his work, should not be accepted without question. Certainly it seems an appropriate idea to invoke humanist version of familiar Christian notion of offering oneself testimony to truth of what has been seen or experienced extreme situations. The writer as is type who increasingly appears annals of twentieth-century literature, representing writer's solidarity with doomed, deprived, victimized, under-privileged (Heaney xvi). But who really should bear witness situations of degradation, suffering, even death? Shouldn't victims speak for themselves? And if they cannot, who can legitimately speak for them? In other words, whose voices are heard, whose have been silenced? And how does passage of time change answers to these questions? The passage of time South Africa since Fugard first began his career has now at last produced sound of many voices, previously silenced, belittled, or degraded, demanding to be heard, ANC exile Barbara Masekela remarked historic speech delivered Grahamstown shortly after her return to country 1990. Indeed, battle is going on for space at center of culture for so long dominated by white minority. Masekela attacked English speakers for having been the most exclusive and resistant to genuine national influences, and associated elite, those who work financed cultural institutions, who have fax machines, telephones for instant interviews and time and resources to create, for enjoying a disproportionate access to national and international media, where their voice is often assumed to be our voice, simply because it is only one anyone has heard. …

Gorbachev's Gamble: Political, Economic, and Ethnic Challenges to Soviet Reform

GORBACHEVS GAMBLE:_____ POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND ETHNIC CHALLENGES TO SOVIET REFORM Bruce Parrott Today the Soviet Union is undergoing a monumental sociopolitical upheaval which will determine the country's fate for decades if not centuries to come. Only once before, in the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution, has the USSR wrestled with such fundamental choices about its political and economic structure. It is now locked in an all-encompassing struggle over whether to reverse those earlier decisions. If the contemporary proponents of liberal reform achieve enduring success, historians in the next century will look back on seventy-odd years of communist rule as a lengthy deviation from late nineteenth-century Russian liberal trends rather than as a logical continuation of the Tsarist autocratic tradition. However, it is also possible that future historians will look back on a chain of events leading to a very different outcome—to a new autocracy or even, perhaps, to the disintegration of the Soviet state. Gorbachev's Agenda and the Forces of Change For several years Mikhail Gorbachev has been claiming that he intends to carry out a "revolution" in the Soviet Union, and it is now Bruce Parrott is Professor and Director of Soviet Studies at SAIS. His works include: Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), The Soviet Union and Ballistic Missile Defense (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987); and The Dynamics ofSoviet Defense Policy (Washington, D.C.: Wilson Center Press, 1990). 57 58 SAISREVIEW evident that he has not been engaging in hyperbole. Although Gorbachev took power in 1985 hoping to revitalize the established Soviet system through tighter discipline and accelerated economic growth, he and his supporters quickly moved to transform the system politically as well as economically. While professing their fidelity to "authentic" Leninism, they have now virtuallyjettisoned Marxism-Leninism as a guide to action and have adopted many philosophical tenets ofWestern liberalism. They have abandoned previous assertions that the Communist Party possesses absolute political truth and instead advocate open political discussion and dialogue. Discarding the Party's traditional domination of society in the name of a mythical general will, the reformers have acknowledged the legitimacy of a wide range of real societal interests. The Party, they now proclaim, must continuously win the public's acceptance of its right to rule. Rather than pursuing Lenin's vision of a society increasingly homogenized by historical and political processes, the reformers affirm that sociopolitical pluralism is both unavoidable and desirable. In economic affairs, they have moved a long way toward accepting the concepts of decentralized markets, economic competition, and private ownership of the means of production. On the whole, these changes in the reformers' general pronouncements mesh with their deeds. Gorbachev, of course, is an exceedingly adroit politician who has frequently made public commitments which he has later broken. To date, however, most ofthe political promises he has broken have been to conservative rather than to liberal goals. For example, his recent disavowal of the Communist Party's legal monopoly on power, while matching the spirit of an historic speech he made to the Central Committee in January 1987, contradicts public reassurances he gave to party conservatives as recently as this past December. Despite the misgivings of conservatives such as Yegor Ligachev, Gorbachev has encouraged the emergence ofinformal groups and popular fronts that have gradually begun to act as political parties and to play a major role in local and regional elections. At his prompting, the regime has created a real, though not yet fully, democratic legislature and has set up a presidency that is scheduled to be filled through direct competitive elections in the mid-1990s. He and his backers have also introduced draft legislation designed to establish legal guarantees for the new political liberties that citizens now enjoy. Together with the changes in the philosophy ofgovernment espoused by Gorbachev and such close allies as Aleksandr Yakovlev, these steps indicate that the reformers are seeking to create a new political order that bears only the most tenuous relationship to the Soviet system we have known since 1917. GORBACHEVS GAMBLE 59 It is far from certain, however, that Gorbachev and his associates have the political leverage and social...

The Caliphate and Atatürk's Inkilâb

My focus in this paper will be on how Atatürk's inkilâbs or "revolutions" actually constituted one total revolution during which the events occurred in sequence as links of one whole historical process. I believe most of the historians of Atatürk's revolution are often too dependent on his historic speech, Büyük Nutuk, which he delivered after the major inkilâb was already completed in 1927. The Nutuk is one and undoubtedly the most important source for the period. But basically it was delivered before a party convention for explanation and justification of the inkilâb and the tactics used for its victory. It will be seen that historically the separation of the Caliphate from the Sultanate and the abolition of the 'atter set off a sequence of events and movements which led to the major inkilâbs including the abolition of the Caliphate and other secularizing reforms in the period 1922-1927.

V. I. Lenin and Methods of Communist Education

Marxist-Leninist teaching on the communist education of the younger generation is integrally connected with the theory of scientific communism and serves the popular struggle to build a new society. In the process of developing the teaching of K. Marx and F. Engels on education, V. I. Lenin formulated and substantiated a highly important principle of communist education: its relevance to the tasks of socialist construction and the policies of the Communist Party. In elaborating upon the Marxist principle of the basic objective of communist education —comprehensive development of the individual — Lenin articulated basic principles characterizing the essence and tasks of education, of forming a scientific world-view in children and youth, and their moral, esthetic, and physical education. He attached maximum importance to the polytechnical and labor education of pupils in comprehensive development of the individual. Lenin emphasized in his historic speech at the Third Congress of the Russian Communist Youth League (October 1920) that only a combination of teaching with the participation of youth in the construction of a new society along with the workers and peasants could ensure a truly communistic education. Lenin's ideas on communist education have been reflected further in the programs and decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU] and the Soviet government and in the speeches and works of L. I. Brezhnev and other Party and government leaders.

Crime, Death and Loyalty in English Liberalism

LNGLISH LIBERALISM is marked by two distinct modes of explanation for human action. One is a theory of learning and action based on maximizing self-interest in a world of scarce goods.' Its model of a just order is a government which protects each man in his body and possessions and enforces voluntary contractual exchanges. A second mode in these same writings is a theory of the historical origin of such political societies and the related problem of the denigration or rejection -in various times and places-of political orders whose primary end is the protection of individual rights. These two patterns of explaining human actions-one set in the timeless logic of psychological empiricism, the other located in the specificity of historical speech and action -come into obvious conflict in discussions of political loyalty and physical coercion. The paradox of men giving their lives to establish or protect a society based on self-interest is inseparably related to the problem of such a society's right to exact capital punishment for the simple crime of theft. Crime, criminals, and physical coercion as treated in the writings of English liberalism are examined here in three separate contexts: (I) in a state of nature or, more generally, in a timeless environment without human artifact; (2) in recorded history, both sacred and secular; and (3) in the future, occasioned by the victory of liberal economic and legal values. The objective of this study is to isolate these differing treatments of crime, criminals, and punishments, to show their relevance to theories of political loyalty, and to show how an understanding of the problems

Law and Social Change in Latin America: The Alliance for Progress

T IE ALLIANCE FOR PROGRESS involves the task of providing an answer to Latin American aspirations for progress and social justice. These goals are to be achieved, as the late President Kennedy stated in his historic speech of March 6, 1961, nithin framework of democratic institutions. Thus the law, conceived both as chisel and mold, as means and as the final resilient shape, is essentially involved in bringing about what an Alliance official recently described as a cultural renaissance for the whole of Latin Resort to violence as means of attaining material progress and consequent abjuration of the democratic processes of government have been impelling factors in the present hemispheric crisis. Moreover, by merely attempting to raise the standard of living in Latin America without concern for the role of in the respective societies, our economic palliation is bound to have little if any permanent effect upon present standards. With this as our major premise, we shall endeavor, first, to analyze briefly and non-technically the concepts of law and justice, as present at different stages of the history of Latin America. Secondly, an attempt will be made to find and evaluate the roots and effects of these concepts upon the role played by law, as peaceful means of attaining social progress. Finally, the function of legal devices in attaining Alliance for Progress goals will be analyzed.

The great historical speech, the speech student, and the speech class

(1962). The great historical speech, the speech student, and the speech class. The Speech Teacher: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 40-43.

Radio Propaganda—A Modest Proposal

Once again the attention of students of international law and relations has been directed to the use of propaganda as an offensive weapon of power politics. President Eisenhower, in his historic speech last August before the United Nations, included in his comprehensive plan for the Middle East a proposal for a system of monitoring inflammatory broadcasts.

Reasons for Cautious Optimism

LAST December President Eisenhower, speaking before the United Nations, proposed a world bank or pool of normal uranium and fissionable materials to be administered by the UN. In this historic speech, the President pointed out that these materials employed constructively could bring about great advances in industrial power, agriculture, biology, chemistry, and medicine—indeed, in just about every facet of physical science. While the President's proposals were widely acclaimed here and abroad, there were doubting Thomases who criticized the suggested project as vague and visionary. Some said the plan was impractical, others labeled it as just another piece of propaganda. It now begins to look as though President Eisenhower's proposals may develop into an effective international cooperative effort. AEC Chairman Lewis L. Strauss, speaking before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council two weeks ago, announced that after discussions with representatives of a number of countries, including the Soviet Union, a ...

Servando Teresa de Mier, Federalist

Thursday, December 11,1 1823, on the eve of the day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an icy rain2 blanketed Mexico City. On this date in the spacious nave of the old temple of San Pedro y San Pablo, a historic speech was delivered to the members of the constituent congress of Mexico. Dr. Servando Teresa de Mier, the speaker, was a man of noble bearing and of distinguished appearance. His angular head with its pronounced featuresgray hair hanging in carefully arranged curls at his neckline and brushed forward to conceal partially a high broad forehead and a lean strong jaw, large black eyes sunk in a pallid face, a long straight nose and small mouth-was set on a tall slender frame clothed in a distinctive purple robe. His mind and actions well fitted his physical appearance. Rich in knowledge and erudition and of refined manners, he was an orator of no small repute, a man of fire and of undaunted courage. For over an hour he held the undivided attention of his audience. It has been generally held that his speech was made against federalism. To the present day, students of Mexican history, on the basis of this discourse, have characterized Mier as the leader of the centralists. But according to his own assertion, he was not a centralist but a federalist. Time after time in his speech he made this clear. His address was not made to protest the proposed establishment of federalism in Mexico but rather to oppose the adoption of a particular form of this system, one allowing greater sovereignty to the component parts than that of the United States. He even prefaced his dissertation with the statement that his remarks would concern Article 5,3 or the nature of

Inaugural Address of the Right Hon

It is with unaffected diffidence that I find myself occupying a chair once honoured by so illustrious an historian as Grote, and so recently adorned by a man so memorable in the history of this century as the late Earl Russell. Each of these eminent men had special qualifications for the post of President of the Royal Historical Society such as I cannot pretend to possess. Both were historians, and both had taken an active part in the political events of their times. If in Mr. Grote the historian predominated over the politician, he yet largely contributed to shape and propagate the political ideas which have since inspired the measures of the party to which he belonged. If the reputation of Earl Russell as a statesman obscures that which he acquired as the historian of the British Constitution, his life from first to last was devoted to historical studies, his writings and speeches teemed with illustrations drawn from history, and perhaps more than any statesman of his age he kept in view historical precedents i n every measure which he framed, and in every State paper which he wrote; while he fixed his gaze on history as his guiding star throughout his long voyage over the dark and troubled waters of political strife.