Sarah Churchwell is a professor of American literature, and in Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “The American Dream,” she draws beautifully on classic fiction as well as the detritus of popular culture to flesh out the two concepts of the book’s subtitle. She frequently approaches political speech, however, in a rather different way. I don’t intend to review the book as a whole here (although I am going to do that down the road), but I found some of the book’s methodological procedure and tacit assumptions questionable in a way that I believe (or hope, at Read more