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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative
90.4  
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March, 2004
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Book Review



The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition. By Jacqueline Bacon. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. xvi, 291 pp. $39.95, ISBN 1-57003-434-6.)

Jacqueline Bacon's study of the rhetoric of American abolitionists in the nineteenth century works on one political assumption and two linguistic ones. If you consent to all three of these in advance and can endure for three hundred pages the silly term rhetor to mean both speaker and writer, then you will benefit from her work. 1
      Analyzing well-known talks and manifestoes from the abolitionist movement by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Harriet Jacobs, and others, Bacon situates these old favorites in a fairly new context—rhetorical analysis—with extremely mixed results. At its best, this study offers an adequate review of canonical texts of the antislavery movement and some of the critical attention these works have garnered in the past decades. It is well researched. . . .

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