WEB LINKS

Web Sites to Find Speeches


You may find speeches many places on the web. Any major figures, especially political figures, have homepages. Often these link to speeches. Try state government, the White House, or the governor's office of any state. Or try one of the links below.

WEB SITES FOR FINDING SPEECHES  

"I am bound by my own definition of criticism:
a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world."
--Mathew Arnold

"When the heart is afire, some sparks fly out of the mouth"--Thomas Fuller

"The critic determines the response to the speech, both immediate and long range, and tries to account for this response. He asks: Was the speech effective? Did it fultill its purpose? Did it achieve its intended goals? Then he attempts to determine what produced the response."
--Robert Cathcart.

"We are born into an environment of words just as surely as we are born into an environment of weather."
--Bess Sondel

American Rhetoric
http://www.AmericanRhetoric.com
A repository of audio and text of 200 speeches, plus other useful features.

American Memory Collection
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/mdbquery.html
This is a searchable database of audio and video files from the Library of Congress.

Douglass Archives of American Public Address
http://douglass.speech.nwu.edu/
Named for Frederick Douglass, this site is an anthology of speech texts from American rhetorical history

Top 100 Speeches
http://americanrhetoric.com/top100speeches.htm
An index and partial database of full text transcriptions of the 100 most significant American polictical speeches of the 20th century. Sixty are available in audio (mp3 or Real Audio).

Gifts of Speech: Women's Speeches from Around the World
http://gos.sbc.edu/

U. S. Senate Historical Office
http://www.senate.gov/history/intro.htm
The historian of the Senate is compiling biographies of all past U.S. Senators. A special feature is a section on the "Famous Five," the orators Webster, Calhoun, Clay, LaFollette and Robert Taft.

Allyn BaconPublic Speaking Website
http://www.abacon.com/pubspeak/histsit.html

 

September 2006

 Communication Studies