Famous public speakers before 1960
The top famous motivational speakers influence lives of masses through their ideas and thoughts. The following article presents short profiles of these well to do motivational speakers. In the past century and especially in the last 50 years, many motivational speakers have influenced the lives of people. Thoughts propagated by these individuals have also been preserved in the form of books. The principles and fundamentals that these inspiring speakers have taught us prove to be helpful in leading a good life. Profiles of some of the renowned inspirational speakers can be found in this article.
We are searching data for your request:
Wait the end of the search in all databases.
Upon completion, a link will appear to access the found materials.
Content:
Films/Videos for Teaching School of Communication Topics
Examining oratory as a dynamic, changing medium for communication during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain, this essay scrutinizes several of its most important sites of performance: religion, politics, social reform, performance, and education. In each of those arenas, oratory helped to fuel some of most exciting social and political changes of the era by reconceptualizing ideas about the relationship between leaders and the public, the notion of rhetorical persuasion, and the importance of public opinion.
An exceptionally interdisciplinary set of scholarship on the subject has done much to invigorate the study of oratory in recent years, and yet this field lacks an intellectual center from which scholars might move beyond individual studies to conceptualize the larger significance of oratory across all sites of performance.
Keywords: Orator , oratory , performance , public , lyceum , political , reform , lecture , speeches , rhetoric elocution , platform culture. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, oratory played major—if sometimes contradictory—roles in Anglo-American life.
For evangelicals, religious oratory helped to win new converts and enliven the experience of faith and redemption in religious revivals and movements that spanned both centuries. Political oratory, particularly during the revolutionary era and amid the waves of democratic movements that succeeded it, utilized new rhetorics that galvanized publics and led to the creation of political and social reform leaders celebrated for their eloquence.
Oratory came to serve a central role in education via the elocution movement for all youth, continuing through schools for more advanced students and in colleges. Increasingly during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, adults had opportunities to buy tickets to educational speeches delivered by a wide range of individuals, who provided single lectures or full series focusing on theatrical, scientific, historical, and other subjects.
Eventually the lyceum movement served as an umbrella instrument for organizing a wide range of public lectures, performances, and orations, particularly in the United States. Oratory could undergird or challenge the status quo; it could epitomize demagoguery or democratic upsurge; it could help to define national identity or exemplify international cosmopolitanism.
Those contradictions within the medium as it was practiced during these centuries reflect some of the many social and political changes of those centuries.
To define oratory so capaciously—encompassing, for example, some theatrical performances and classroom elocution as well as rhetoric and more traditional speech performances—might appear unconventional on the surface, but it reflects the direction that scholars in a range of disciplines have taken during the last twenty years. In this respect, oratory both discussed and modeled a particular makeup of the public and a properly constituted, hierarchical public sphere.
But such arrangements underwent crucial shifts, especially during the nineteenth century, as more women and people of color made places for themselves on the rostrum, thus assuming that position of oratorical power and making it possible to imagine alternative ways of organizing society. In the embodied performances of oratory by different kinds of speakers, audiences might find themselves challenged to consider new gender, class, and citizenship roles.
In seeking out challenges to the status quo and new modes of public speech, scholars have increasingly looked beyond great speeches.
The abundance of literature on the subject reflects its exceptionally interdisciplinary nature. The interdisciplinary exchange among these scholars has led to some notable, productive innovations in the study of platform culture. And yet its lack of a disciplinary or conceptual home has left many scholars to explore their research independently, remaining more dedicated to the standards of their own disciplinary training than to the extraordinary potential inherent in the study of oratory per se.
Moreover, these studies seldom take a broader view of oratory as a major mode of communication during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when oratory attained such cultural prevalence and thrived as a primary medium for the exchange of ideas. Our scholarship has tended to focus on the institutional pockets in which that oratory took place—in churches or on evangelical circuits, the American lyceum system, Fourth of July celebrations, parliamentary debate, or reform advocacy venues, among other arenas of study.
In taking that focus, scholars have often contributed to insightful studies of the past, as changes in public speaking led to new ways of thinking about religion, new political institutions and participants, and new forms of engaging communities, interest groups, and nations.
But they have not tended to offer a big-picture view of oratory as a vital medium of communication that encompasses multiples institutions or sites of performance.
Nor have they begun to scrutinize how the spoken word resonated across genres, between and among niches for oral performance, in the two centuries before the advent of the recorded voice. As a result, the larger payoff of all these niche studies today sits just beyond the grasp of the current literature, yet suggests rich new avenues for exciting research. Scholarship on the oratorical past requires new work that goes beyond the focus on venues or oratorical registers to illuminate the cultural work of this medium during these two important centuries when it flourished.
This article focuses particularly on the British Atlantic with special attention to the North American scene, where oratory experienced such prominence, innovation, and popularity, particularly during the long nineteenth century. I seek throughout to discuss some of the major topics and questions addressed by the scholarship but do not seek to provide a comprehensive view of this expansive field and indeed could not, given its breadth.
Most of all, I seek to suggest possibilities for future research that takes advantage of the interdisciplinary ferment between scholars to reinvigorate our understanding of a wide range of subjects—the media, popular politics and entertainment, the notion of public assembly, and the cultivation of ideas—while also illuminating more about the nature of oratory itself as a medium of communication.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, educational institutions used classically inspired works such as A System of Oratory by the British rhetorician John Ward, a book that became the most popular text on rhetoric in American colleges until the end of the century. This volume, like many other similar texts for a wide variety of reading audiences, rested heavily on the ideas of Cicero and Quintilian that privileged the style of address as much as its substance.
Setting this emphasis on oratorical persuasion in its historical context is vital, for this was not merely a high-level intellectual movement. Indeed, it reflects a flurry of historical developments unique to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that connect to the popularization of education, politics, and religion, and the expansion of what scholars came to call the public sphere.
Although often tied to the growth of print culture, these movements were equally dependent on changing priorities within the medium of oratory and, in fact, led to important innovations in oral persuasion.
Although universal access to voting rights, political participation, and education remained almost impossible to imagine in the eighteenth century, much less implement, each of these areas of public life expanded to include middling sorts on an unprecedented level. With an upsurge in evangelical religion and participatory politics, oratory became a primary means of reaching larger publics, and not just those individuals with minimal levels of literacy.
Considered in this light, literature on oratory during these centuries challenges one of the important scholarly touchstones that influenced the study of the spoken word: the innovative work from earlier in the twentieth century that posits a historical displacement of orality by literacy and print culture in human societies.
Literacy and writing comprised technologies that required significant labor, if not education, to learn; but they also brought about certain kinds of cultural losses. Inasmuch as scholarship like that of Ong sought to underscore the sophisticated nature of oral cultures, it also relied on early anthropological notions that literate cultures were more advanced, and that print represented a significant development in human communication technologies.
As a result, since the s some scholars have moved away from assessments that presume technological advancement over time. Increasingly the scholarship speaks of oralit ies and literac ies and, in so doing, recasts the framework from a universal to a historicist perspective Gustafson, ; McDowell, Those earlier assumptions about cultural sophistication and modernization have led more recent scholars of the spoken word to challenge the notion that orality might have been waning in the increasingly literate eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Anglo-American societies.
On the whole, however, scholars have turned away from the developmental model in favor of a formulation that sees orality and literacy developing in tandem and sometimes in tension with one another Fox, ; Looby, Take, for example, the use of new forms of preaching in the eighteenth century and the means by which innovative evangelicals used print to publicize their effectiveness in their providential mission.
As Harry S. Just as significant, these men innovated in developing publicity machines that used newspapers not just to advertise their talks, but also to cultivate in the imaginations of newspaper readers ideas about the possibilities of religious experience. I heard he was come to New York and the Jerseys and great multitudes flocking after him under great concern for their souls. And after all that, when Whitefield appeared on the scaffold:. And my hearing him preach gave me a heart wound; by Gods blessing my old foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me.
Walker, , 89— Paralleling these historical shifts in communication, orality became ever more central to education by means of the mid- to late-eighteenth-century elocution movement. Although schools had long employed oral recitation as part of their daily lessons, during this era those declamations became anchored to elocutionary techniques for performing those lessons.
Originating in England and Scotland, this pedagogy sought to teach students that even the most rudimentary forms of learning to read required appropriate gesture, facial expression, and vocal modulation. At the college level, the oratorical emphasis within education grew more pervasive, especially as English began to displace Latin as the language of scholarship.
Inspired by models of education in Scottish universities, pedagogies that stressed the importance of rhetoric and utilized recitation and oratorical display spread throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world. Formal instruction took the form of lectures, with students displaying their learning in declamation. Students also formed separate debating clubs to further develop their skills—clubs that became increasingly popular and dynamic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Indeed, those debating societies inspired many individuals outside of the college setting to form similar clubs for their mutual benefit—a small number of which permitted women to engage as disputants as well Andrew, ; Eastman, ; Thale, Oratory also emerged in settings beyond the pulpit, the podium, and the classroom—most notably as a powerful element of theater.
The oratorical guidebooks that taught youth how to read and speak aloud invariably included theatrical speeches and dialogues alongside canonic orations by the classical greats. Pedagogical training in oratory was in many respects indistinguishable from training as an actor during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it required the same attention to bodily performance and feeling the passions.
Moreover, such speeches also had the benefit of being widely known among members of the public, who thereby had the capacity to judge good and bad performances of those monologues. And by the end of the eighteenth century, British and American theater featured a number of transatlantic celebrity actors whose performances influenced the wider world of public speech. In a wide variety of settings, including impromptu street protests as well as colonial legislative debates about the possibility of rebellion, colonists used oratory to create a persuasive narrative: that the British had grown tyrannical in their treatment of their fellow citizens, and that the American colonies were justified in advocating independence.
In fact, Americans came to feel that political oratory and political debate were of such importance to the public that after the war, architects added seating areas or galleries from which members of the public could listen to and judge the respective positions put forward during political battles Fliegelman, ; Looby, In each of these areas—preaching styles, modes of pedagogy, and popular politics—oratory became more significant as a medium of communication during the eighteenth century, even as literacy levels rose throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world.
Looking broadly at the changing importance of oratory as well as innovations by individual speakers within the medium, we can see that it grew in influence over a wide swath of the public.
George Washington made a retiring and awkward speaker, Thomas Jefferson could barely speak above a whisper, and the former lawyer John Adams was divisive and abrasive rather than persuasive. In fact, the American who gained the most fame as an eloquent orator before the s was Native American. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creatures.
Inasmuch as Americans believed that their new republic required fine orators as leaders, it took more than thirty years after the Revolution for such figures to appear on the political scene Eastman, One of the first figures to inspire new forms of public speech by combining oratory and improvisational performative innovation was a Scottish immigrant named James Ogilvie, who had taught school in Virginia for fifteen years and who, after ample experience with elocutionary methods, was determined to make a living as an itinerant orator.
He does not form an ethical treatise; he exhibits a picture of life, he chooses rather to describe than to reason, and his descriptions are glowing, pathetic, and impressive. Capitol building before an audience that included President Madison and both houses of Congress and spent a term at the South Carolina College later the University of South Carolina teaching students the art of oratory. Along the way, he fostered a national conversation about the importance of oratory in a republic Eastman, At the same time Ogilvie became a household name he sparked emulation; after departing a city, local newspapers displayed advertisements for new debating societies, lyceums, orators who imitated his style and even his costume, a toga , and schools for elocution and dramatic recitation.
Several of these individuals were celebrated in Edward G. When Ogilvie continued his lecture tour in England and Scotland in , he found a public similarly eager for various forms of performative and educational oratory, as a contemporaneous movement was underway in Britain. As such, the book placed strongest emphasis on the literary or political quality of the texts.
He also included reflections on the art and craft of oratory:. To be a great orator does not require the highest faculties of the human mind, but it requires the highest exertion of the common faculties of our nature. He keeps upon the surface, he stands firm upon the ground, but his form is majestic, and his eye sees far and near: he moves among his fellows, but he moves among them as a giant among common men. Hazlitt, , II: 5. In Britain as in the United States, which saw the end of almost all restrictions on the white male vote by the s, these changes made political oratory more vital to the overall political system.
They also rendered public opinion more important, as the relative powers of the aristocracy and social elites declined. Reflecting those democratizing changes, journalists in both countries began to pay close attention to governmental debate and to reprint versions of those speeches in the public prints.
Print media helped to cultivate a strong sense that the public ought to scrutinize the speeches of their political leaders. By the s, newspapers developed methods of obtaining full transcripts of major orations—at first by requesting the text from the speakers and, eventually, by training their staff in shorthand to sit in political chambers and record them. As newspapers columns ballooned with these accounts, politicians paid ever more attention to the crafting of their speeches, competing for the admiration of the public and the support for their causes that it generated.
Public attention to political oratory also raised the bar for the vocal delivery by speakers during the nineteenth century. As Josephine Hoegaerts has demonstrated, members of the House of Commons now paid extraordinary attention to the fine details of their delivery—the acoustic and somatic aspects of how parliamentary discourse sounded and resonated.
Speakers carefully managed their bodies and voices, seeking to convey authoritative, masculine power and privilege, while also appealing to new constituencies of the public. Also highly attuned to public opinion were the social reformers, who, increasingly during the s and s, began to use print and oral media on an unprecedented level to persuade the public of the need for change.
Whether advocating for temperance, ending prostitution, founding Sunday schools, arguing for world peace, or opposing slavery, reformers mobilized a barrage of media to draw public attention to their causes. They published reform tracts and periodicals in unprecedented variety and numbers; orators for those causes found vivid ways to heighten the emotional stakes of these social problems.
Inspired by dramatic preachers of the Second Great Awakening whose styles and messages appealed to a large percentage of the American middle class, reform orators anchored their social improvement causes to a powerful sense of urgency for Christian uplift and religious expansion.
As the world of reform grew ever more crowded with seemingly urgent causes, reformers found innovative ways to fight for the attention of the public. Temperance leader John B.
Oratory and Platform Culture in Britain and North America, 1740–1900
Two centuries before Twitter, U. From George Washington to Donald Trump , presidents have always adopted the latest media and technology to connect with voters and forward their political agenda. George Washington was well-aware of the public scrutiny surrounding his presidency, the first experiment with executive power in the political experiment that was the United States. America had just unshackled itself from an English monarch and was on high alert for any signs of despotism in its new president. The president praised Congress and gently offered suggestions regarding the creation of a national currency, a post office and a system of weights and measures, while also weighing in on more controversial topics even then like the national debt and immigration. Washington knew that the speech would be published in the newspapers, so it was a message to the American people as well as Congress.
List of Famous Motivational Speakers
This list of famous public speakers includes photos, bios, and other information, when available. Who are the top public speakers in the world? This includes the most prominent public speakers, living and dead, both from America and abroad. Some of these popular public speakers are also responsible for the longest speeches in history and the best presidential speeche of all time. This list of notable public speakers is ordered by their level of prominence, and can be sorted for various bits of information, such as where these famous speakers were born and what their nationality is. The people on this list are from different countries, but what they all have in common is that they're all renowned public speakers. No great public speakers list would be complete without big names like Deepak Chopra and Mike Huckabee. All these good public speakers know that it takes lots of practice, critical thinking, and confidence to be ranked among the greatest public speakers ever - and everyone on this list has that in spades.
BLACK MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKERS, Business Leaders & AUTHORS
New user? Create an account. Already have an account? Sign In. By creating an account, you agree to our Privacy Policy.
The life of Martin Luther King Jr.
Shortly thereafter, chromosome studies were developed to confirm the diagnosis of Down syndrome. During the first half of the twentieth century in the United States, the majority of children with Down syndrome were placed in institutions — frequently soon after birth. This resulted in great human sacrifice for those individuals and for their families, who were convinced, often by members of the medical community, that the child was less than human and that their needs would be so great, their families would not be able to raise them. This was the climate that the founders of the National Association for Down Syndrome had to deal with when their children were born in In those days the standard operating procedure in hospitals was for physicians to advise parents to institutionalize their newborn infants with Down syndrome. Parents who did not follow this advice took their babies home without support or services.
Top 15 Motivational Speakers in the USA
I really wish that Bob will live more than hundred years. And you know what? His beginnings were terrible! When Bob was at 26 years of age, somewhere around the year of , he was a miserable and unhappy individual, completely lost in life. Then one day something happened.
There might be affiliate links on this page, which means we get a small commission of anything you buy. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Please do your own research before making any online purchase.
Researching speeches given by famous and inspirational individuals can be exceptionally useful to those of us who need to give a presentation. A few names come to mind as true greats of inspirational public speaking. Here we identify the individual traits each of these speakers demonstrate when delivering a speech. If it worked for them, how could those same techniques help you when making a presentation? The late, great Jobs is often first on any list of great public speakers. The way in which he presented Apple's first iPhone in completely changed the presentation industry.
This list consists of DVDs and streaming videos. Links go to catalog records with call numbers and program descriptions for the DVDs or directly to streaming videos. Streaming video pages generally include short descriptions of the programs. Streaming video access is restricted to users with current American University IDs. Ceremonial Speaking This program provides helpful models of commencement, eulogy, and commemorative speeches.
Lessons for speakers often focus on the same tips. Make eye contact. Speak slowly.
Yes, sounds seductive
Granted, a great sentence
Yes, really. So happens. Let's discuss this question. Here or in PM.
very valuable piece
I am also worried about this question. Tell me where can I read about this?