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Lucille Ball’s 1953 testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee is a rhetorical puzzle. How was a woman with documented Communist affiliation able to avoid being blacklisted? The intert...

To tell the whole story of the struggle for woman suffrage, we need to begin the story well before 1848 and continue it long after 1920. For those teaching about woman suffrage, this essay offers r...

Debate is a civic skill necessary for democracy. Participation in debate is important not only because it teaches habits of advocacy that enable a person to win an argument, but because debate, at its best, teaches us how to lose and, in losing, understand why others act the way they do.

Posters for Peace is a beautiful book that captures an ephemeral rhetorical moment and holds it for extended reflection to teach enduring lessons about civic action. This book is for anyone interes...

During the spring of 1919, the National Woman's Party sponsored the Prison Special, a cross-country train tour of 26 white women who had been jailed as a result of their protest activity for woman suffrage. Using visual, embodied, and verbal enactments of imprisonment and civic action, the Prison Special constituted white women's citizenship through simultaneous rhetorics of inclusion and expulsion. The Prison Special's foregrounding of white women's martial capabilities, respectability, and vulnerability justified white women's inclusion in the category of citizen. The Prison Special's contrast of the imprisoned white suffragists to Black women co-prisoners participated in the expulsion of Black women from the category of citizen.

In 1996, Argumentation and Advocacy published a groundbreaking issue devoted to visual argument. It was the first collection of essays on the subject. Twenty years later, we consider some of the do...

On a windswept hill in Wyoming, a cairn lamenting that "there were no survivors" now stands corrected by historical plaques recognizing 1,500 Indian survivors. On the high plains of eastern Montana, a sea of white marble tombstones now is interspersed with red granite warrior markers. In bustling Chicago, a tall, bronze police officer, removed from his original location, loses a century-long standoff with a nearby sculpture of Justice placing a wreath on a fallen laborer. The monuments that occupy sacred sites make arguments about who is worthy of mourning, honor, and remembrance. The monuments themselves endure, but their arguments often are controversial and judgments of worthiness have proven far less permanent. In his influential work, The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade (1959) offered an understanding of the sacred that still resonates within scholarship of sacred space. The sacred, he wrote, "reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world" (p. 31). Nowhere are these functions more apparent than in sacred spaces: spaces set apart from their surroundings, ritually dedicated to the memory of a particular event, hero, or victim, and frequently adorned with enduring markers-often for those who lost their lives there--that offer seemingly eternal narratives of origin and orientation (Foote, 2003, p. 8). By enshrining particular narratives on a sacred site, monuments suggest what is worthy of remembrance at a site and solidify the history of a community. In so doing, they fix the limits and establish the boundaries of that community. Because of the perceived permanence of sacred sites, visitors often attach special significance to the civics lessons carved in stone and cast in bronze on the sites' monuments (Rosenzweig & Thelan, 2000, p. 105). Although scholars have attended to the construction of narratives at memorial sites, and the conflicts that often accompany such constructions (e.g., Blair, Jeppeson, & Pucci, 1991; Gallagher, 1995; Gallagher & LaWare, 2010; Hubbard & Hasian, 1998), the question of how these narratives are argued for or against-particularly after a monument is dedicated-is under-theorized. In this essay, we explore how argumentation works at sacred sites, and how arguments about the past, once carved in stone and cast in bronze, may be countered. We suggest that attempts to stabilize memory in monumental form may be countered through several argumentative strategies, including dissection, transformation, and substitution. Each of these strategies destabilizes memory and opens up sacred spaces to alternative articulations of the past by expanding the lives deemed worthy of remembrance and grief. We believe that traditional understandings of refutation as linguistic negation (answering the claim "x" with the response "not x") cannot account for the unique strategies that excluded groups have used to argue at these sites. Recent work on visual argument has elaborated new modes of nondiscursive countering and we, in turn, extend these modes into three-dimensional experience by analyzing three highly-contested sacred spaces: Fetterman Battlefield, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and Haymarket Square. These three sites invite comparison. Each was consecrated by the blood of the fallen, each was marked with a monument enshrining a particular narrative of its history, and each has been the site of sustained argument over who should be remembered. Therefore, each enables us to explore the visual argumentation of monuments, the functions of argument in sacred space, and the use of sacred space to expand communal boundaries. Although monuments compete at numerous other U.S. sites (e.g., the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, Arthur Ashe in Richmond's Monument Avenue, Albuquerque's Cuarto Centenario Memorial), these three permit exploration of the relation between mourning and blood consecration, and of the ways in which visual argument may open, or close, consideration of who is human and worthy of remembrance. …

Introduction. A Brief History of the National Communication Association Pat J. Gehrke & William M. Keith *Discovering Communication: Five Turns toward Discipline and Association J. Michael Sproule *Paying Lip Service to "Speech" in Disciplinary Naming, 1914-1954 Gerry Philipsen * The Silencing of Speech in the Late 20th Century Joshua Gunn & Frank E.X. Dance *Epistemological Movements in the Field of Communication: An Analysis of Empirical and Rhetorical/Critical Scholarship James A. Anderson & Michael K. Middleton * The Scholarly Communication of Communication Scholars: Centennial Trends in a Surging Conversation Timothy D. Stephen * Sexing Communication: Hearing, Feeling, Remembering Sex/Gender and Sexuality in NCA * Charles E. Morris III & Catherine Helen Palczewski *Liberalism and its Discontents: Black Rhetoric and the Cultural Transformation of Rhetorical Studies in the 20th Century. Reynoldo Anderson, Marnel Niles Goins, & Sheena Howard *A Critical History of the "Live" Body in Performance within the National Communication Association Tracy Stephenson Shaffer, John M. Allison Jr., & Ronald J. Pelias * Listening Research in the Communication Discipline David Beard & Graham Bodie * Conceptualizing Meaning in Communication Studies Brian L. Ott & Mary Domenico * Communicative Meeting: From Pangloss to Tenacious Hope Ronald C. Arnett Afterword. What's Next? William F. Eadie