Frederick Douglass's Curious Audiences

This book attempts to answer a fundamental question: How did Douglass manage to persuade anyone about the evils of slavery, and even impress viewers with his personal qualities, when his speeches were commonly considered mere entertainment, in the same category as Barnum's circus acts? In answering this question, Terry Baxter provides a means of understanding the positive responses of Frederick Douglass's white audiences and African American celebrities' roles as both objects of consumption and vehicles for social change. 1. Introduction 2. Reformation and Resentment in Antebellum America 3. Antebellum Rhetorical Culture in Theory, Criticism and Practice 4. The Construction of Blackness and the Constraint of Ethos 5. Douglass as an Exhibit of Ethos Bibliography