Languages can offer us an incredible wide-angle view of new cultures and peoples. It can also serve as an extremely effective vehicle to communicate and discern information. Thusly, the skills of oratory, public speaking and eloquence have been an important tool in our cognitive evolution and they will continue to be so, for as long as time permits us. I think that even though, it's an understatement to simply quote and support the importance of the legacy, the Greeks have left us with luminaries such as Socrates, Plato and, most specifically, Demosthenes who encapsulated the epitome of oratory skill in Athens. It's not completely out of place to revisit them and try to understand their past and give them the credit they deserve, even so, if it's solely on the account of extream master orators of the time.
Examining oratory as a dynamic, changing medium for communication during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain, this blog scrutinizes several of its most important sites of performance: religion, politics, social reform, performance, and education. In each of those arenas, oratory helped to fuel some of the most exciting social and political changes of the era by reconceptualizing ideas about the relationship between leaders and the public, the notion of rhetorical persuasion, and the importance of public opinion. An exceptionally interdisciplinary set of scholarship on the subject has done much to invigorate the study of oratory in recent years, and yet this field lacks an intellectual center from which scholars might move beyond individual studies to conceptualize the larger significance of oratory across all sites of performance.
