W. Stuart Towns is a retired professor and department chair for the Communication Studies Department at Southeast Missouri State University. He is the author of 'We Want Our Freedom': Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement.
"By careful attention to the ceremonial settings and the
persistence of the speech-making themes over several generations,
the author shows how the status of the orators, the pervasiveness
of the rituals, and the repetition of themes for so long created a
new white-dominated southern public identity out of the social
chaos, uncertainty, and despair at the end of the Civil War in the
South."
--Charles Reagan Wilson, author of Judgment and Grace in Dixie:
Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis and Baptized in Blood: The
Religion of the Lost Cause, 1868-1920 "Town's analysis is
beneficial and informative as a rhetorical history of Lost Cause
rhetoric. . . . [and] encourages scholars to consider how southern
rhetorical history and mythology still echoes within state and
national discussions today."
--Rhetoric Public Affairs
"No southern historian has ever brought such a wealth of source
material to bear on a subject. Primary sources dominate the
manuscript, in every chapter. The manuscript has a solid core of
rhetorical/artifactual sources that, woven carefully together,
never waiver from the centrality of Town's thesis - Lost Cause
rhetoric tells the story of the South. No other region of the
country can make such a claim."
--Carl Kell, author of Against the Wind: The Moderate Voice in
Baptist Life
"No southern historian has ever brought such a wealth of source
material to bear on a subject. Primary sources dominate the
manuscript, in every chapter. The manuscript has a solid core of
rhetorical/artifactual sources that, woven carefully together,
never waiver from the centrality of Town's thesis - Lost Cause
rhetoric tells the story of the South. No other region of the
country can make such a claim."--Carl Kell is a professor of
Communication at Western Kentucky University and the author of
Against the Wind: The Moderate Voice in Baptist Life, coauthor of
In the Name of the Father: The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist
Convention and editor of Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist
Convention Holy War
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