Being ubiquitous, language is essential to our everyday existence. Human language is seen to be a traditional field that depends on using words in accordance with intricate standards. In this study, the idea of aggressiveness is investigated from a pragmatic viewpoint. The goals of this research are to identify the aggressive techniques that…

Over the past decade, sociologists have become increasingly interested in the formal study of semantic relations within text. Most contemporary studies focus either on mapping concept co-occurrences or on measuring semantic associations via word embeddings. Although conducive to many research goals, these approaches share an important limitation:…

Radical-right campaigns commonly employ three discursive elements: anti-elite populism, exclusionary and declinist nationalism, and authoritarianism. Recent scholarship has explored whether these frames have diffused from radical-right to centrist parties in the latter's effort to compete for the former's voters. This study instead investigates…

Public discussion of "the authoritarian personality" returned with the election of President Trump. This article traces the rise of that concept and broader study of mass society in American social science, with adaptations into composition studies from the 1960s to the 1990s-followed by their lamentable eclipse under a lethal…

One of the critical issues facing Historians today has been the emergence of Strong State regimes and the politicized pseudo history they produce in countries claiming to adhere to democratic norms. The attack on the Capital of the United States was based on a series of lies about voter fraud supported by President Donald Trump and members of…

Political elections have been shown to influence youth civic development. The election of Donald Trump is historic and has elevated precarity for people of color and immigrants, yet we know little about how young people with these identities experienced this potentially catalytic event. Using ethnographic methods, we examined youth and adult…

David Bordelon identifies himself as one of the majority of Americans who voted to keep Trump out of office. In this article he discusses his confusion by the Tea Party's fixation on welfare fraud, and inability to recognize it in President Trump's behavior. The author says that he can only hope that his confusion will be shared, and progress to…

This paper explores the creation and content of apps about Donald Trump (n=412) published in Google Play between June 2015 and January 2018. The relevance of the study stems from both its objectives and its methodology. On the one hand, the aim was to characterise the profile, motivations and purposes of the developers of Donald Trump apps; and on…

This study aims to investigate the use of personal pronouns in political speeches made by Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Election Debates. The focus is on uses of the first personal pronouns 'we' and 'I' as strategies to express persuasive messages and political ideologies especially the inclusion and exclusion of the…

This article was prepared for the Critical Media Literacy Conference in Savannah, Georgia in 2016. The central argument of the article is that Donald Trump's candidacy emerges from a new strategy: branding. The author explores the decade prior to Trump's rise and his political forebears, as well as consults critical marketing and television…

Given the nature of the Electoral College system, the two major political parties concentrate on winning the electoral votes of those states in which the preference of voters are divided evenly. Thus, the parties and their candidates ignore states such as Wyoming and Oklahoma, which are reliably Republican, and they ignore states such as…

Political commentators routinely treat rural America as an undifferentiated bastion of strength for Republicans. In fact, rural America is a deceptively simple term describing a remarkably diverse collection of places encompassing nearly 75 percent of the U.S. land area and 50 million people. Voting trends in this vast area are far from…

Historically, Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have consistently functioned as engines of social change and racial uplift and are among the few places where Black culture is placed at the forefront, appreciated, and sustained. Today and in the future, it will be paramount for HBCUs to not only embody their eminent legacies of social change,…

How do we preserve our civil society and dynamic political system and prepare students to be active citizens in a democratic society? The need for civic education is more essential now than ever before, and students deserve access to powerful civic lessons that actively engage them in learning about our democracy. The ultimate goal would be for…

While historical thinking has a rich literature, civic thinking has been an underdeveloped area of research in social studies education. I discuss in this article three activities designed to strengthen students' civic thinking skills by examining the "political death and resurrection" of Richard Nixon in the 1960s. These three…