Sometimes it seems you take two steps forward and then one step back. Obama said many times that the road to democracy is long and hard. But more often than not, progress is not linear: sometimes you go backwards. 1.3 Farewell Address, 2017įinally, Obama mentions the Declaration of Independence in his farewell address, in which he had to find a balance between his belief in the historical progress of the values and ideals of the Declaration and the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.ĭoes the election of Donald Trump wipe Obama out? Is Obama an exception or is he a mark of progress? The pretty sophisticated way in which Obama talked about that very issue in his farewell address was to reiterate his belief in long-term progress. There is a close identification of the nation with that founding document and the ideas contained within it. This is what Obama said in his first inaugural address: I have selected a few extracts of his speeches where he refers to the Declaration of Independence: unsurprisingly, Barack Obama mentions the Declaration during big occasions, when he would have the largest audiences.īarack Obama’s first ever national speech was a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004: he had been noticed and picked out by the John Kerry campaign that year to give this important speech – Bill Clinton had done it before, it is a real breakthrough for any politician trying to make it and maybe one day run for president. Quoting the Declaration of Independence 1.1 Keynote Speech at the DNC, 2004 One of the things that may be noticed about Barack Obama’s many references about American history is how often he cites the founding documents of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the Constitution drafted in 1787, ratified in 1788 and implemented in 1789. The abolition of slavery may therefore be seen as an extension of the American Revolution to the 1860s, and then the abolition of Jim Crow laws a hundred years later as a further extension of the ideas of liberty and equality that were there from the founding of the U.S. ![]() Moreover, analysing our interpretation of history, and not just the facts, is a good way get into the analysis of history.īarack Obama takes the American Revolution not just as something that is contained in time the ideas of the American Revolution have evolved throughout American history, in particular with the abolition of slavery and segregation. ![]() Why is it interesting to look at the American Revolution through Barack Obama’s eyes? One reason is that, listening to his speeches and reading his book when he first campaigned for the presidential election in 2008, and observing how attuned he was to American history, it is quite striking to see how much it informed his politics, his values as well as his policies, his ideologies as well as his ideas, and how much he actually knew about it. What we see through Obama is an interpretation of American history that presents the American Revolution as something that is not finished yet, but has been ongoing since the Revolution itself. I will try to show how he uses language to reinforce historical interpretation in a way that is very clever and that you would not get with his successor. This presentation is about the language Barack Obama uses as well as his interpretation of American history. ![]() Télécharger le Power Point de Steven Sarson Introduction
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