Major Speeches Research Articles

Failure to Launch: Women and Hindu Nationalist Politics in Colonial India

What role does the participation of women play in the political success or failure of radical right-wing religious movements? This study examines the participation of women in the politics of the radical Hindu right in India – known as Hindu nationalism – in its formative years at the turn of the twentieth century. I rely on interpretive empirical methods of archival research and close reading of major texts and speeches, papers, and party documents to find that the first political party of Hindu nationalism – the All-India Hindu Mahasabha – failed or neglected to mobilize and incorporate women in its activities. This failure was among the reasons for the failure of the Mahasabha as a political party, and the early failure of Hindu nationalism as a political enterprise. This is a mistake that its contemporary counterpart, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has not repeated. These findings suggest that the contemporary political success of radical religious nationalism in India derives in part from its relative success in incorporating the participation of women as compared to its historical predecessors.

The Results of the XIX International Congress of French sociologists: new approaches to the study of uncertainty

The paper reviews the major speeches of leading scientists at the last Congress of the largest associations of French-speaking sociologists. Analyzed the most pressing problems and the processes described in the work of the scientific forum dedicated to new approaches to the study of uncertainty in almost all spheres of human life, society and the state.

John Curtin's Forgotten Media Legacy: The Impact of a Wartime Prime Minister on News Management Techniques, 1941–45

As Australia’s wartime leader, John Curtin generated international headlines for his “breaking news” broadcasts, candid media conferences and electoral success. Yet there has been a lack of studies on Curtin’s impact as a media communicator. To evaluate his legacy for government-journalist relations, this article conducts a multi-method approach, including analyses of rarely viewed archives about Curtin’s use of the media and the newspaper coverage of his major wartime speeches. The research indicates that Curtin expanded the ways that the prime minister communicated with public audiences through press interviews, the radio, films and television during World War II. Through his extraordinarily frequent media discussions, he opened up more opportunities for citizens to interact with political leaders, the government and parliament. Arguably, modern political communicators still borrow from Curtin’s news management legacy through the use of question-and-answer media conferences, news briefings, occasional off-the-record talks and use of the most advanced audio-visual technological innovations to communicate with voters.

Learning to Discover Political Activism in the Twitterverse

When analysing social media conversations, in search of the public opinion about an unfolding political event that is being discussed in real-time (e.g., presidential debates, major speeches, etc.), it is important to distinguish between two groups of participants: political activists and the general public. To address this problem, we propose a supervised machine-learning approach, which uses inexpensively acquired labeled data from mono-thematic Twitter accounts to learn a binary classifier for the labels “political activist” and “general public”. While the classifier has a 92 % accuracy on individual tweets, when applied to the last 200 tweets from accounts of a set of 1000 Twitter users, it classifies accounts with a 97 % accuracy. Our work demonstrates that machine learning algorithms can play a critical role in improving the quality of social media analytics and understanding, whose importance is increasing as social media adoption becomes widespread.

The Constitutional Philosophy of Barack Obama: Democratic Pragmatism and Religious Commitment

ObjectivesThis article examines whether Barack Obama has a Constitutional philosophy and, if so, what those ideas are.MethodsThe article notes contrasting scholarly views on whether Obama's career exhibits consistent ideas and on the content of his ideas. It uses interpretive exposition of Obama's major writings, speeches, and presidential initiatives, based on all of Obama's writings and speeches through 2010, to identify Obama's ideas.ResultsObama generally expresses and acts on views that accord with modern democratic pragmatist philosophic beliefs in deliberative democracy. It has not been fully recognized that Obama interprets the meaning of the U.S. Constitution as embodying these beliefs; that he blends this Constitutional view with egalitarian commitments that he identifies with black church social justice values; and that he sees the American Constitutional system's central goal as building greater public unity without effacing diversity.ConclusionsObama belongs to the modern democratic pragmatist tradition elaborated by American thinkers and political leaders since the Progressive era, but his distinctive Constitutional version of this outlook stresses deliberative democratic processes, black church social justice values, and the contention that the goal of the American Constitutional system is “e pluribus unum,” “out of many, one.”

VolksgemeinschaftEngineers: The Nazi “Voyages of Technology”

Punctually at 4:05 on the morning of March 31, 1938, a new diesel locomotive left the Holzkirchen Bahnhof in Munich, pulling the first traveling “achievement exhibition” (Leistungsshau) of German technology. It had been nineteen days since theAnschluss, and on April 10 all Greater Germany would vote its approval of incorporating Austria into the Reich. Despite their use of terror to influence the Austrian vote and virtual assurance of electoral success, the National Socialists embarked on an extensive propaganda effort in Austria to ensure a wide margin of victory there. Hitler campaigned throughout Austria during the last ten days before the vote, making six major speeches, and other top Nazi officials made electioneering tours. Famous for constructing theAutobahnnetwork, Fritz Todt, Inspector General for German Highways, and the engineers of the NSDAP Central Office for Technology, organized a traveling propaganda exhibit to display German technology under the motto “Austria's chimneys will smoke again.” It was the first of three “Voyages of Technology” undertaken by Todt and his Nazi engineers.

Is Obama the Conflict Reconciliation President?

The Obama campaign focused on the future President's interest in political reconciliation. Has he succeeded in manifesting his campaign identity as a governing peacemaker? This question is examined through selected acts that illustrate his efforts to extend the olive branch; a discussion of leadership style; the meaning of reconciliation; and an analysis of seven major speeches Obama delivered during his first two years in office to evaluate his conflict resolution/reconciliation focus using DICTION software, a content analysis program. The net assessment is that he has not been able to transfer his campaign image into presidential operations. Reconciliation means overcoming polarization and bridging deep differences across opposing parties - Obama has tried to do this in domestic and foreign policy but without success. His rhetoric has, however, opened the terrain of new ideas - bipartisanship on the domestic front; attempted altered relations with the Muslim world in a major shift from Bush administration policies; and he sustains a very high level of optimism, a key to effective leadership. In subtle ways, the rhetoric advances the conflict reconciliation theme by broadening debate in the articulation of policy and imagining social agreement.

Parliamentary Report

How liberal democracies can accommodate tenaciously-held religious views within the wider framework of human rights legislation and balance the resulting conflicts is a conundrum that confronts governments throughout Europe and was the theme of three major speeches delivered at the end of the period under review.

A Remarkable Retirement: Theodore Roosevelt's Post-Presidential Decade

A Remarkable Retirement:Theodore Roosevelt's Post-Presidential Decade Sean Creehan (bio) Edmund Morris , Colonel Roosevelt, New York, Random House, 2010. 784 pp. $35.00 Edmund Morris has spent nearly half his life and the majority of his career devoted to Theodore Roosevelt, beginning with the Pulitzer Prize-winning first installment of a trilogy devoted to the former president, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979), continuing with Theodore Rex (2001), a chronicle of Roosevelt's presidency, and concluding with the recently published Colonel Roosevelt, which examines the last decade of his life, a period when Roosevelt preferred the honorary "Colonel." Given the common tendency of biographies to ebb and flow in excitement with the trajectory of the subject's life, the success of Rise speaks both to Morris's extreme talent and the incomparable complexity of Roosevelt's life. In concluding the trilogy, Morris delivers a similarly compelling work, gracefully unraveling an action-packed narrative while evoking Roosevelt's oversized character. While less talented biographers might be tempted to skip over the less dramatic details of their subjects' lives, Morris seizes on these (albeit few) moments to convey what one can only imagine was an excruciating descent into old age for Roosevelt, a man who demonstrated unparalleled skills as president in an eight-year period that, while formative, only foreshadowed the grave decade to come, when Roosevelt felt an even stronger call to public service. How could a man like this, one so universally respected even by his worst enemies, sit on the sidelines without crippling angst? Morris shows how Roosevelt's manic adventures abroad and his prolific writing career helped fill this void after he left office, and in the process illuminates the great struggle in Roosevelt's spirit until his death. Beginning shortly after the end of his presidency in April 1909, Colonel Roosevelt devotes nearly its first hundred pages to Roosevelt's thrilling African safari and subsequent European tour, which was sponsored by the Smithsonian Museum and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. For the Smithsonian, the naturalist Roosevelt would collect a large variety of samples of African wildlife [End Page 137] and fauna. Carnegie had more abstract goals for the European tour's major speeches in Paris, Berlin, and London, at which Carnegie hoped statesman Roosevelt would strongly endorse the cause of world peace.1 A third sponsor, Charles Scribner's Sons had commissioned the writer Roosevelt to chronicle his safari, to be published first as a series of articles in Scribner's Magazine. As Morris skillfully paints a vivid picture of Roosevelt's developing adventure, he reintroduces readers to Roosevelt the man of many talents, and the rest of his days would indeed be spent moving between the professions of naturalist, politician, and writer. Morris's account of Roosevelt's tour of the European capitals demonstrates the unique status of Roosevelt the ex-president: "Evidently he was to be treated everywhere as if he were a head of state." As Morris quotes one correspondent, "[w]hen he appears, the windows shake for three miles around. . . . He has the gift, nay the genius of being sensational."2 Capitalizing on rapt audiences, Roosevelt spoke with confidence, warning the French of the dangers of pacifism, the Germans of shortsighted racial phobias, the British of half-hearted colonialism, in each case driving to the very heart of national anxieties (and foreshadowing the coming Great War). When England's King Edward VII died during the trip, Roosevelt even served as Special Ambassador of the United States to the royal funeral, or as he jokingly calls it, "a wake at Buckingham Palace!"3 Europe would arguably not embrace an unofficial U.S. statesman so excitedly for another century, when then-candidate Barack Obama drew 100,000 Germans for a major campaign speech in Berlin in 2008. While Colonel Roosevelt begins with the great momentum of Roosevelt's post-presidential year, return to the United States brings its subject back into the domestic spotlight and the incessant political dabbling that would characterize the rest of his life. Morris's account is painful at times, rehashing old anxieties and dilemmas ever-present in Roosevelt's post-presidency career: a desire to serve, an intolerance for...

Medvedev's Russia, a ‘revisionist power’ or an ‘architect of a new world order’? The evolution of ideational factors and its cases

Abstract This article explores the impact of ideational factors on Russian foreign policy outputs. “Collective ideas,” defined by Thorun as “shared expectations of behavior by the Russian leadership about the nature of international relations and ideas about the state,” characterizes the Russian leadership's perception of external challenges and its definition of national interests that crucially affect the leadership's choice of the most effective means for maximizing the national interests. To assess the influence of such ideational factors on the outputs of Russian foreign policy, analyzed in this research are major foreign policy speeches, statements, and interviews of the Russian leadership. This research analyzes the discourse to explore the perception of the Russian leadership and the Medvedev government on the nature of international relations, the identity of Russia, Russia's status and role in the international community, strategic national priorities, and strategic options for achieving its int...

Measuring Implicit British Perceptions of German Intentions in 1938-1939

Implicit British perceptions of German leaders during the period September 30, 1938–September 1, 1939 (from the Munich Agreements to the German invasion of Poland) are studied with a “ratio of threat accentuation” measure. This ratio is calculated by comparing the densities of power motive imagery in two kinds of archival material: full texts of major Hitler speeches versus summaries in The Times of London, and British versus German accounts of meetings between British diplomats and major Nazi leaders. In both cases, the British ratio of threat accentuation increases following the unexpected German occupation of Prague and the rest of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. These changes in implicit perception are congruent with changes in British explicit perceptions and foreign policy after the German action.

Back to Bethel: Geographical Reiteration in Biblical Narrative

The history of Syro- Palestine did not begin with appearance of Israelites. The topography and climate of that region helped to shape cultures for thousands of years. As a result, many of cities mentioned in biblical narrative had long histories prior to appearance of ancient Israelites.1 For instance, archaeological excavations at Jericho have revealed occupation layers reaching back to Mesolithic era, ca. 9,000 b.c.e. Jerusalem, which would eventually become Israel's capital city, had, according to mid-fourteenth-century b.c.e. El Amarna tablets, an earlier incarnation as a political center, serving as a Canaanite citadel ruled by an Egyptian political appointee.2 This prior history associated with significant sites in part explains inclusion of scribal glosses in text that provide both old and new names for several cities. Thus, Hebron was once known as Kiriath-arba (Josh 15:13); Dan originally was named Laish (Judg 18:29); and Jerusalem previously was referred to as Jebus (Josh 18:28). The process of placenames evolving also contributes to development of a scribal and political strategy known as geographic reiteration, which takes advantage of authority associated with sites and, in some cases, uses this to manipulate story or memory of events. Before exploring characteristics of geographic reiteration as they relate in particular to often-mentioned site of Bethel, I want to focus first on significance of place in biblical narrative and briefly discuss contribution of spatiality theory. Using a definition of place as any area which an observing consciousness . . . distinguishes and separates, by whatever means, from other areas,3 I would further note that can be divided into distinct types or modes. Firstspace is used to identify those concrete locations that can be mapped and that we determine to be physical realities, such as cities, mountains, and rivers.4 Secondspace represents imagined in other words ideas about such as traditional significance or sacred character of a place. Finally, thirdspace, can be thought of as lived space, which encompasses full range of human activities associated with a particular firstspace.5 Henri Lefebvre uses term for what I am calling thirdspace. He identifies social as the outcome of a sequence and set of operations and notes that there is nothing imagined, unreal or 'ideal' about it.6 There is value in employing this spatial framework for understanding how is perceived in ancient world and how concept of is manipulated by different elements of society. By applying these concepts, it becomes possible to classify how is associated with events, legal formulations, architectural design, political boundaries, economic activities, and personal ambitions.7 For instance, it is instructive to note where modern politicians declare their candidacy for office or deliver major policy speeches as a clue to significance they place on specific sites (a secondspace concept). One means of deciphering spatial understanding of ancient Israelites is to examine ways in which is both defined and manipulated by persons and events. This can be as simple as identifying physical places where Israelites performed different types of work, worshiped and engaged in religious rituals, transacted business, practiced and executed legal decisions, and gathered for important announcements (all thirdspace designations). However, these mundane social practices take on different meanings, purposes, or intentions depending on where in and time they occur and characteristics of participants (e.g., Boaz calling together elders of Bethlehem in gate area to discuss Naomi's legal problem [Ruth 4:1-2]). Thus, content or substance of act (farming, public speaking, ritual, and transaction) derives meaning from ( 1) rank, authority, or status of person involved, and (2) physical and symbolic character of space (including time, place, occasion, or setting) in question. …

President Bush's major post-Katrina speeches: Enhancing image repair discourse theory applied to the public sector

When Hurricane Katrina swept the Gulf Coast, President Bush's newly formed Department of Homeland Security received its first test and failed. In Katrina's aftermath, Bush not only had to manage one of the nation's worst natural disasters, but also had to quell political backlash about the federal government's response to Katrina. This study examines: (a) how Bush presented the federal response to Katrina in his speeches; (b) how Bush responded to the public's criticism in his speeches; and (c) how effective Bush's speeches were in repairing his tarnished image.

Jonathan Charteris-Black: POLITICIANS AND RHETORIC: THE PERSUASIVE POWER OF METAPHOR.

Jonathan Charteris-Black sets out to raise critical awareness of the language used by political leaders to convince others. Such rhetoric functions through a discourse of legitimisation in which political myths are created. He proposes ‘that a better understanding of the conceptual basis for metaphor—and how this relates with other aspects of rhetoric and persuasion—will provide a clearer understanding of the nature of [the] thoughts, beliefs and values and the myths through which they are communicated’ (p. 30). The result is at least interesting, and more often than not richly illuminating. The analysis is corpus-based. Major speeches of Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and George W. Bush are analysed for the rhetorical strategies employed in them, and particularly for the patterns of metaphor use and their significance. The metaphors are identified, analysed according to source domains and frequency, and then explored for their contribution to the overall projects of the speakers. They ‘direct our interest towards underlying conceptualisations that were important in influencing core value judgements in [the] creation of political myth’ (p. 40). Myth is seen as a socially sustaining phenomenon and as a site for creativity and adaptation. It is a major means of ideological transmission, appealing ‘to our emotions (or pathos) through unconsciously formed sets of beliefs, attitudes and values’ (p. 13). The main approach used in this exploration is Critical Metaphor Analysis, a subset of Critical Discourse Analysis, augmented by appeals to cognitive semantics.

Aufklärung und Abwehr: The lasting legacy of the Stasi under Ernst Wollweber

The following article traces the development of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, during the reign of Ernst Wollweber, the second Minister of State Security. By examining key Stasi operations during this period, notably the ‘concentrated strikes’ strategy following the June 1953 revolution, the campaign against Ostbüros, and operations to secure the economy, and by examining Wollweber's major speeches, it argues that Wollweber's reign was a decisive one for the Stasi because of the integration of intelligence gathering outside of East Germany (Aufklärung) with domestic surveillance (Abwehr). Although this balance shifted toward external duties in Wollweber's landmark August 1955 speech, Wollweber continued to promote integration of the two duties, in particular by anchoring the intelligence gathering duties in the local-level domestic structures of the Stasi.

The Production of a Beloved Community: Sesame Street's Answer to America's Inequalities

The children's public television program Sesame Street strived exemplify and create an egalitarian and more tolerant community both on screen and in actuality. Sesame Street's aim educate disadvantaged urban preschool children and put them on an equal intellectual level as their middle-class peers when they entered grade school was central the development and direction of the show. To appeal their audience, the producers designed reproduction of working-class, urban city block for television studio set and directed multiethnic and multilingual cast of human and puppet characters that taught fundamental skills for reading, writing, and mathematics as well as social practices of open-mindedness, tolerance, and goodwill. The diverse cast commingled and solved problems together in their neighborhood setting. With the debut on November 10, 1969, and at least three years prior of preparation and research, Sesame Street grew out of the era's milieu of the civil rights struggle and the effort of social reform. The vision and principles of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s beloved community signified the central commitment of the show. The idea for beloved community developed long before King espoused his message the civil rights movement, but the concept became popular as result of his leadership and appeal. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebhur, and Josiah Royce combined Christian doctrine and the practice of moral compassion define their ideal vision of beloved community (Zepp). By the mid-1950s, recognized as the beginning of the civil rights movement, King pronounced in speeches and published writings his primary goal as the fulfillment of such society. The roots of King's philosophy and the beliefs he carried throughout the movement remain in contention as scholars debate King's major influences and primary goals. Zepp situates King's influences in the history of American liberal theology, while James Cone and Richard Lischer find the source of King's position in the Southern Baptist Church and African American religious tradition. Throughout the movement, King's thinking proved anything but static, but his goals expressed in his publications and major speeches, designed for mostly white audience, emphasized nonviolence and the realization of beloved community. In beloved community, the diverse peoples of the United States and ultimately the world reconciled their differences, integrated, cooperated, and coexisted with one another. I have dream, King called out at the March 1963 on Washington that ... the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able sit down together at the table of brotherhood (qtd. in Carson and Shepard 85). He asked for peoples of all nationalities and religions join hands and respect one another (Carson and Shepard 87). Childhood is not simply time of innocence - free from the social and cultural pressures of the adult world -but defined by historical trends and political agendas. Joel Spring argues that, throughout its history, the behaviors and goals of the public school system have sustained the goal of cultural domination. Public schools particularly have become one form of what Spring calls ideological management (4), or the act of creating and dispersing knowledge throughout society. From its incipience, the public education system sought to manage the distribution of ideas m society (3) in order preserve and uphold democracy. Sesame Street became an example of such school; originally financed by the federal government and nonprofit organizations, the program educated children through the medium of television before they entered the school system. Spring argues that the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), the production company behind Sesame Street, attempted shape public morality and present a standard as what the world should be like (384). …

Presidential Rhetoric, the Public Agenda, and the End of Presidential Television's “Golden Age”

The rise of alternative viewing choices, brought about by the spread of cable television, has effectively reduced the audience for major presidential addresses. Has this change moderated the influence of major presidential speeches on public opinion? After examining the period from 1954 to 2002, we provide evidence that the impact of presidential rhetoric in State of the Union addresses on public opinion has diminished as cable has flourished.

Pauline Hanson's One Nation: Extreme Right, Centre Party or Extreme Left?

To what extent do writings about Pauline Hanson or One Nation construct her or her party as a phenomenon of the Right, the Centre or the Left? To what sorts of values - Left or Right - did her major speeches mostly appeal? And where did electors, both those who voted for One Nation and those who did not, place the party ideologically? This article shows how Hanson's politics were frequently characterised as a politics of the Right, though what sort of Right - extreme Right, populist Right, plain Right, and so on - was a matter on which there was no agreement. It demonstrates that while her maiden speech in 1996 and the speech she gave to launch her party in 1997 focused on issues of race and ethnicity - Aborigines, migrants, and multiculturalism - in ways that have come to be associated with the Right, the speech she gave to launch her party's 1998 federal election campaign focused on jobs, an issue more often associated with the Left. The study also uses survey evidence to show that while One Nation as less likely than the Liberal or National Party to be seen as a party of the Right, respondents were more likely to see One Nation as a party of the extreme Right. Yet more than any other party, including the Greens, One Nation was also seen as a party of the extreme Left. The least commonly held view - except by One Nation respondents - was that One Nation was a party of the Centre.

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet

RISE OF THE VULCANS: The History of Bush's War Cabinet James Mann New York: Viking, 2004. xxii, 420pp, $39.00 cloth (ISBN 0-670-03299-9)Why did the United States invade Iraq in the spring of 2003? One way to find an answer to this question would be to sift through the Bush administration's public remarks leading up to the war. All the key members of President Bush's foreign policy team appeared on television, delivered major speeches, and testified before a variety of international and domestic agencies laying out their case for war. This sort of an approach would allow us to understand all the stated reasons for invading Iraq: the belief that Iraq was a growing threat, the belief that the United States must act quickly and decisively to check this growing menace, and the belief that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was a central component of the war on terror.But such an approach would not shed much light into why key foreign policy advisers believed these things. Why did the administration believe that the United States had to act? Why do key foreign policy advisers believe the war against Iraq was justified despite the fact the no weapons of mass destruction were discovered? Why do these advisers believe there is a connection between Saddam Hussein and the events of September nth? To answer these fundamental questions, one must have a sense of the beliefs and world views of those who are responsible for making US foreign policy. James Mann's book, Rise of the Vulcans, is excellent in this regard.As Mann points out, one can imagine a very different set of responses to the events of September nth. In order to understand the Bush administration's response to this tragedy, one must have a sense of the policy makers involved, their histories, and their perspectives on international relations and the United States' place in the world. Thus, Mann has written a collective biography, a book that traces the professional and ideological development of President Bush's key foreign policy advisers: Vice President Dick Cheney, National security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Deputy secretary of State Richard Armitage. The term Vulcans refers to Bush administration officials who previously served in other Republican administrations. The nickname originated with the advisers themselves, during the 2000 presidential campaign.Mann has wisely chosen to write the book in a thematic manner. Rather than devoting a single chapter to each individual, Mann has chosen to organize the book chronologically. …

What Presidents Talk about: The Nixon Case

Aside from the much‐analyzed State of the Union addresses and other major speeches, existing research tells us little about which issues presidents emphasize in their public rhetoric, how they do it, why, and with what effects. This article closely analyzes the public rhetoric of Richard Nixon over his entire presidency. The first section catalogs key characteristics of Nixon's rhetoric that confirm central expectations of the modern “public presidency” including the tendency of the “rhetorical presidency” toward oral rather than written formats, the orientation of “going public” by primarily addressing the general public rather than elite audiences, and a “two‐presidency” tilt toward emphasizing foreign over domestic policy. In addition, the article uses the month‐to‐month variations in the amount and content of presidential rhetoric to examine two hypotheses—that presidential rhetoric is a strategic tool that presidents use to affect real‐world events (rhetoric‐driven events) and that rhetoric is cast about by the winds of the world (event‐driven rhetoric). Despite the impression in some presidential studies that presidents are primarily movers of events, our findings offer substantial support for the event‐driven rhetoric hypothesis and only some evidence of the rhetoric‐driven event hypothesis.