Douglass's writings, his autobiographies in particular, have long been cornerstones of the literary and historiographical scholarship generated around his life and work. Other major sources have included Douglass's private correspondence and editorial writing, with the letters in particular casting light on a range of relationships, public and private, throughout his career. The publication of Series One of the Douglass Papers: Speeches, Debates and Interviews by John Blassingame from 1979 to 1986 greatly expanded the body of material readily available to Douglass scholarship, compiling newspaper and other reports of his speechmaking from a wealth of sources, across a fifty-year period from the earliest days of his career. The papers help to round out the public figure Douglass presented, framing him within contemporary institutional politics in the United States. An important corollary of this is that Blassingame's collection allows for a directional change in Douglass scholarship. With their focus on the very public realm of rhetoric and performance, the three volumes in the collection facilitate critical approaches less concerned with genre, textuality or formal, one-to-one relationships than with the contingencies of group interaction in the public sphere. In short, Blassingame's collection suggests that attention to the nature and form of the performative self and its interaction with wider culture is both possible and necessary.

The first formal study of Douglass's training in public speaking and rhetorical inheritance, Gregory Lampe's Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818–1840, appeared in 1998, initiating a directed debate around the issues of voice and rhetorical structure.