Table of Contents

Conversation in America - William F Eadie and Paul E Nelson
Changing Rules, Hidden Dimesions
Toward a National Conversation about Public Issues - W Barnett Pearce
The Declaration of Independence in the Rhetoric of American Politics - Stephen E Lucas
Some Distinctive Features of American Conversation - Donal Carbaugh
Language and Agency in the Transformation of American Identity - Molefi Kete Asante
New Communication Technology and the Changing Nature of Conversation - Everett M Rogers and William B Hart
Political Conversation - Roderick P Hart Jr
A Distortion
Changing Relationships, Changing Conversations - Julia T Wood

About the Author

William F. Eadie (Ph.D., Purdue) is Director of the School of Communication at San Diego State University, where he is responsible for leadership of a large program of 2,300 student majors and 125 faculty encompassing all aspects of communication, media, and journalism.  Prior to joining SDSU in 2001, he was Associate Director of the National Communication Association (NCA) in Washington, DC, where he worked with researchers and promoted communication research to a variety of audiences.  His other faculty appointments have been at Ohio University and California State University, Northridge, and he has served as an adjunct of visiting faculty at the University of Minnesota, University of Maryland, UCLA, and California State University, Los Angeles.  He served as the first editor of the Journal of Applied Communication Research after it became an NCA publication and also has served as President of the Western States Communication Association.  His scholarship focuses on how interpersonal rhetoric impacts on the development of relationships, and he has been an advocate for the application of communication research in ways that affect the lives of ordinary people.  He has received the NCA Golden Aniversary Award for outstanding journal article and has been elected a member of the national honorary societies Phi Kappa Phi, Golden Key, and Phi Beta Delta.  With Paul Nelson, he co-edited two books for SAGE:  The Language of Conflict and Resolution (2000) and The Changing Conversation in America: Lectures from the Smithsonian (2001). Hired by NDSU in the year 2000 to chair the Department of Communication and to launch a new doctoral program with my spouse, Dr. Judy C. Pearson, I am now head of the department. I teach undergraduate courses because that is my preference. I have professed and administered at the University of Missouri, Iowa State University, Ohio University, and Virginia Tech, before coming to NDSU. I was Dean of the College of Communication at Ohio University for fifteen years.

I have four degrees from the University of Minnesota with post-doc work both at Harvard and at Columbia University. I have written many college textbooks with my spouse, so many that I honestly don′t know the count. All I know is that we have been writing textbooks for three decades.