U.S. Congress Ordinary Deliberation in America's Legislature
by Catherine F. Smith
Syracuse University
Abstract
In this webtext, Congressional hearings are presented as discourse events in the everyday life of a democratic governmental institution.
The first event is a treaty deliberation in the first federal Congress on August 22, l789. The scene is the Senate, where the senators met in executive session to deliberate a draft treaty with southern Indian confederacies. Outside the Senate door, a Cherokee delegation waited.
The web is a scholarly monograph composed for the World Wide Web. This scholarly web's purpose is documentary interpretation, or interpretation of real-time rhetorical action in an historical event as we can know it from records of the event. To show how records frame knowledge of events, the web adds commentary on historical processes of producing, receiving, and using public records.
The web is about government. Whether teachers or students, global watchers of television's C-SPAN and similar public affairs networks, elected officials, or professional staff in government, many of us wish we knew more about how government actually works. This web speaks to that wish.
This web was peer-reviewed by Todd Taylor and Richard Selfe of the Kairos Editorial Board.
Contact Catherine Smith by e-mail
Note: There are no external links in this webtext.
