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Looking closely at inaugural addresses
This week many of us will take the timely opportunity to study an important primary source–the Inaugural Address.
The New York Times offers a fascinating interactive timeline of word clouds, summaries, and full-text documents. (I suspect today’s address will be posted shortly.)
The timeline takes
a look at the language of presidential inaugural addresses. The most-used words in each address appear in the interactive chart below, sized by number of uses. Words highlighted in yellow were used significantly more in this inaugural address than average.
Combined with the full-text for context, the analysis of these word clouds offers students a kind of short-hand lens with which to view history–a visualization of rhetoric and ideals, as well as a strategy for comparing and analyzing the different issues that face a president and a country each four (or so) years.
More resources:
- Word clouds prepared by the Federal News Service
- “I Do Solemnly Swear”: Presidential Inaugurations a collection of approximately 400 items or 2,000 digital files relating to inaugurations from George Washington’s in 1789 to Barack Obama’s inauguration of 2009 from the American Memory Collection of the Library of Congress
- The National Archives’ Inaugural Quiz
- Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies offers speeches, facts, videos, slideshows and more
- Inauguration Firsts from the Smithsonian
- The New York Times also offers an opportunity for students to Build Your Own Inaugural Address of excerpts from past addresses.
- PBS offered an opportunity to write President Obama’s address out of Historical Inaugural Speeches, Obama Quotes, and an Obama Speech Template.
- First Ladies from the National Museum of American History offers far more than gowns
- White House YouTube Channel
Filed under: inaugural addresses, media literacy, primary sources, speeches
About Joyce Valenza
Joyce is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Rutgers University School of Information and Communication, a technology writer, speaker, blogger and learner. Follow her on Twitter: @joycevalenza
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