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Among pivotal historical moments in the United States, the civil rights movement stands out. In Where the Sacred and Secular Harmonize: Birmingham Mass Meeting Rhetoric and the Prophetic Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, David G. Holmes offers an original rhetorical analysis of six speeches delivered during the 1963 civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Holmes frames his analysis within the biblical concept of prophecy. However, he stresses the idea of prophecy as sociopolitical forth-telling, rather than mystical foretelling. Based on his own transcriptions from rare recordings, Holmes examines how these orations, which clergy and laypeople delivered, address enduring themes such as the role of religion and politics, black leadership and black activism, and the political and popular legacies of the civil rights movement. Drawing upon American history, politics, hermeneutics, homiletics, and rhetoric, Holmes's discussion ranges from civil rights prophets to contemporary politicians, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama. Where the Sacred and Secular Harmonize illustrates how the Birmingham mass meeting oratory of 1963 represented a quality of democratic discourse desperately needed today.

We know theirs to have been the hands that helped build the nation's canals and railroads, the transport for so many immigrant groups making their way to the newly formed state of Wisconsin in the mid–nineteenth century. Yet the stories of Irish people in Wisconsin and their role in our state's history became almost invisible as time passed. Irish in Wisconsin recounts the nature of the Irish immigrant experience in Wisconsin both in relation to other ethnic groups and to the larger story of Irish immigration into this country. David Holmes shows the impact of the Irish on the state's early development and politics. He explores the Irish cultural contribution to the state and the current resurgence in Irish pride and identity. Irish in Wisconsin tells this story with solid historical analysis, first-hand accounts, and rare photographs.

Revisiting Racialized Voice:African American Ethos in Language and Literature argues that past misconceptions about black identity and voice, codified from the 1870s through the 1920s, inform contemporary assumptions about African American authorship and ethos. Tracing elements of racial consciousness in the works of Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, and others, David G. Holmes urges a revisiting of narratives from this period to strengthen and advance notions about racialized writing and to shape contemporary composition pedagogies. Pointing to the intersection of African American identity, literature, and rhetoric, Revisiting Racialized Voice begins to construct rhetorically workable yet ideologically flexible definitions of black voice. Holmes maintains that political pressure to embrace“color blindness” endangers scholars'ability to uncover links between racialized discourses of the past and those of the present, and he calls instead for a reassessment of the material realities and theoretical assumptions race represents and with which it has been associated.