Allison M. Prasch

Plot Lines: The Rhetorical Construction of Washington, D.C.

The origin story of the U.S. capital city is a microcosm of the nation and its contradictions. In 1791, President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson undertook an ambitious venture: carving out a new “seat of government” that would, they hoped, become “the capital of an extensive empire.” But even in the act of building a city “entirely new,” this construction process reflected and reinscribed narratives of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and the institution of slavery upon the grid of what we now know as Washington, D.C. In this book, I analyze how U.S. politicians approached the physical construction and spatial design of the nation’s new capital city as a deliberate act of persuasion, one designed to display a robust image of a new nation “conceived in liberty” even as it enslaved Black Americans and denied the rights of Indigenous peoples who called this “wilderness” their home. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork in and around Washington, D.C., I seek to uncover and recover the tacit assumptions about race and racism, white nationalism, American exceptionalism, and settler colonialism that laid the ideological, geographical, and spatial foundations for the “City of Washington.” Applying a specifically rhetorical approach to this narrative illuminates how U.S. politicians deployed words, actions, bodily movements, spatial configurations, geographical locales, and topographical representations to invite identification, create a shared sense of national unity, reinforce notions of power, and elevate some individuals over—and at the expense of—others. Ultimately, my goal to tell a story that will help readers see, experience, identify, and confront the foundational role race and racism played in the formation of the U.S. capital city from the literal ground up.

Dr. Allison M. Prasch is Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. An expert in U.S. presidential rhetoric, political communication, and the history of rhetoric, her research and teaching seeks to understand how U.S. political leaders use words and actions to create and sustain a particular vision of the United States to national and global audiences. Her first book, The World is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War (University of Chicago Press, 2023), examines how U.S. presidents used their rhetoric abroad as a persuasive strategy during the Cold War. Professor Prasch is also the co-editor (with Sara L. McKinnon) of Reassessing Foreign Policy Rhetorics in a Global Era: Concepts and Case Studies (Michigan State University Press, 2024), and her award-winning academic scholarship has appeared in venues such as Presidential Studies Quarterly, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Rhetoric & Public Affairs. As an internationally recognized expert in U.S. presidential rhetoric and political communication, Professor Prasch’s commentary has been featured in outlets including the Associated Press, Washington Post, Newsweek, The Hill, Boston Globe, Politico, C-SPAN, the BBC, and Wisconsin Public Radio.