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Category Archives: History of Public Speaking
A lesson from the Parthenon
I was recently in Athens, Greece to speak at a conference. While there, I had one free day and, as it was my first time in Greece, there was one place I had to see: the Parthenon that sits atop … Continue reading
Posted in History of Public Speaking, Rhetoric
Tagged Acropolis, Aristotle, Athens Greece, Ethos, Logos, Parthenon, Pathos, rhetoric
3 Comments
50th Anniversary of the Death of Martin Luther King Jr.
Today, 4 April 2018, marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr. He was assassinated on 4 April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 39 years old. On 3 April 1968, the day before his assassination, … Continue reading
Celebrating Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream”
On 28 August 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered one of the most famous speeches in history, I Have a Dream. I write this post on the 53rd anniversary of that … Continue reading
Posted in History of Public Speaking, Motivation
Tagged I have a dream, Martin Luther King
2 Comments
The Gettysburg Address: An Analysis
On 19 November, we commemorate the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863. In one of the first posts on this blog, I compared Lincoln’s two-minute address with the two-hour oration by Edward Everett on the same occasion. Today the … Continue reading
“The Few”
Last week marked the 70th anniversary of one of the most famous speeches in modern history. On 20 August 1940, Winston Churchill addressed the British House of Commons and delivered his epic speech to honour “The Few” — the Allied … Continue reading
Some Chilling Public Speaking History
Here is a rather chilling passage from The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It captures in a few short paragraphs the sense of terror that pervaded the Soviet Union under Stalin. Nowadays, we often hear people talk about being “bored to … Continue reading