All We Say is the story of the United States through fifteen speeches – some iconic, others long forgotten, all pivotal – from its founding to the intense divisions of our times, from one of President Obama's former speechwriters.

For 250 years, America has debated what it means to be American. The question shaped the compromises in the Constitution and the arguments they’ve had ever since, spawning abolitionism, secession and civil war; populism, mass migration and global leadership; movements for reform and the backlashes to them.

Through riveting accounts of the people, movements and moments that produced these speeches, Rhodes traces the history of America's battle over identity. The result is a singular and revealing portrait of the United States: a nation divided between two stories – one of inheritance, power, and exclusion, the other of equality, striving, and belonging.

Drawing on a decade writing for Barack Obama, Rhodes also reveals how words can redirect a nation, what makes a speech enduring, and why oratory is a unique form of persuasion in a democracy.

These speeches remind us that history is a living argument. At a time when American identity – and truth – is contested, All We Say offers a fresh and powerful look at who America really is, and who it could still become.

By the end of America s Golden Age of Magic, Chicago had taken center stage in front of an American audience drawn to the craft by the likes of Harry Houdini and Howard Thurston. Cashing in on a craze that rivaled big-band mania, magic shops and clubs sprang up everywhere across the Windy City, packed in customers and put down roots. Over the last century, for example, Magic, Inc. has outfitted magicians from Harry Blackstone Sr. to Penn and Teller to David Copperfield. Magic was an integral part of Chicago s culture, from its earliest venture into live television to the card sharps and hucksters lurking in its amusement parks and pool halls. David Witter keeps track of the shell game of Chicago s fascinating magic history from its vaudeville circuit to its contemporary resurgence.

Universities are unlikely venues for grading, branding, and marketing beauty, bodies, poise, and style. Nonetheless, thousands of college women have sought not only college diplomas but campus beauty titles and tiaras throughout the twentieth century. The cultural power of beauty pageants continues today as campus beauty pageants, especially racial and ethnic pageants and pageants for men, have soared in popularity. In Queens of Academe, Karen W. Tice asks how, and why, does higher education remain in the beauty and body business and with what effects on student bodies and identities. She explores why students compete in and attend pageants such as "Miss Pride" and "Best Bodies on Campus" as well as why websites such as "Campus Chic" and campus-based etiquette and charm schools are flourishing. Based on archival research and interviews with contemporary campus queens and university sponsors as well as hundreds of hours observing college pageants on predominantly black and white campuses, Tice examines how campus pageant contestants express personal ambitions, desires, and, sometimes, racial and political agendas to resolve the incongruities of performing in evening gowns and bathing suits on stage while seeking their degrees. Tice argues the pageants help to illuminate the shifting terrain of class, race, religion, sexuality, and gender braided in campus rituals and student life. Moving beyond a binary of objectification versus empowerment, Tice offers a nuanced analysis of the contradictory politics of education, feminism, empowerment, consumerism, race and ethnicity, class, and popular culture have on students, idealized masculinities and femininities, and the stylization of higher education itself.

This study explores the dynamic relations between cultural forms and political formations in some urban cultural movements. The analysis is based on a detailed study of the structure and development of the London Notting Hill Carnival, widely described as Europe's biggest street festival. Started in 1966 as a small-scale, multi-ethnic local festival, it grew into a massive West-Indian dominated affair that over the years occasioned violent confrontations between black youth and the police. The carnival developed and mobilized a homogenous and communal West-Indian culture that helped in the struggle against rampant racism. The celebration is contrasted with other carnival movements, such as California's 'Renaissance Pleasure Faire'. Analytically, this is a follow-up to Cohen's earlier studies of the relations between drama and politics in some urban religious, ethnic and elitist movements in Africa. The conclusion focuses on the processes underlying the transformation of rational political strategies into non-rational cultural forms.

In the cool, pre-dawn hours on a June night in 1918, a train engineer closed his cab window as he chugged toward Hammond, Indiana. He drifted to sleep, and his train bore down on the idle Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus Train. Soon after, the sleeping engineer's locomotive plowed into the circus train. In the subsequent wreckage and blaze, more than two hundred circus performers were injured and eighty-six were killed, most of whom were interred in a mass grave in the Showmen's Rest section of Chicago's Woodlawn Cemetery. Join local historian Richard Lytle as he recounts, in the fullest retelling to date, the details of this tragedy and its role in the overall evolution and demise of a unique entertainment industry.