David W. Seitz - Böcker

World War I, Mass Death, and the Birth of the Modern US Soldier: A Rhetorical History examines the United States government’s postwar ideological and rhetorical project in establishing permanent national military cemeteries abroad. Constructed throughout Europe where citizen-soldiers had fought and perished, and sacralized as American sites, these burial grounds simultaneously linked the nation’s war dead back to American soil and the national purpose rooted there, expressed the nation’s emerging prominent role on the world’s stage, and advanced the burgeoning icon of the “sacrificial, universal” US soldier. It draws upon untapped archival and historical materials from the WWI and interwar periods, as well as original on-site research, to show how the cemeteries came to display and advance the vision of the modern US soldier as “a global force for good.” Ultimately, within the visual display of overseas cemeteries we can detect the birth of “the modern US soldier”—a potent icon in which divergent emotions, memories, beliefs, and arguments of Americans and non-Americans have been expressed for a century.

Quiet Defiance: The Rhetoric of Silent Protest focuses on the rhetorical dimensions and power of silent protest. Bridging the gap between the study of protest and the study of rhetorical silence (strategic silence meant to communicate to and influence an audience), this book is the first of its kind to concentrate solely on the phenomenon and tradition of silent protest. The contributors to this volume hail from different cultures, disciplines, and fields. They examine past and present-day cases of silent protest with different research questions and paradigmatic perspectives in mind and methodological approaches at hand. Collectively, however, their original chapters offer a rich, multifaceted understanding of the potentialities, limits, nature, effects, risks, and rewards of silent acts of protest—individual or otherwise—against oppressive, unjust regimes and systems of power.