Selected Presidential Speeches

The speeches collected in this volume—one or more for each of the forty-six elected American presidents—are historical documents. The subjects that they address, however, are perennial themes that define our democracy and that recur in various forms with each new administration’s legislation: state laws versus federal laws, the guarantee of the individual citizen’s right to vote in free and fair elections, the separation of church and state, the role of the popular vote versus that of the e...