So, I'm a non-historian scholar of public address (speeches, essentially). In my discipline, practically all existing scholarship is on American speeches, with the exception of a few British ones, Hitler's speeches, and Classical Greek and Roman speeches. Every now and then somebody breaks the mould, but in general there is a minuscule amount of scholarship of speeches outside of these among public address scholars. I see this as a major problem in the field and have some interest in breaking out of the American-centric and classical period-centric obsession. Problem is, I need some good inspiration to get the ball moving. My goal isn't just to write some stuff myself, but get people in my field to pay attention to (a) the problem in the first place and (b) the massive untapped potential that's out there.

So, my question: What are some especially significant historical speeches from around the world (outside of the Western tradition would be great, but in the Western tradition is fine too) that a project like this really ought to touch on? For example, I know very little southeast Asian history, or African history, or even much of the Muslim or Arabic traditions. The same could be said for most of my colleagues who study public address in the US.

I'm well aware that reading speeches in a vacuum without knowing their contexts isn't valuable and won't produce good new research, but identifying a few key speeches that I don't already know about would be a wonderful starting point for what is likely to be a project that takes many many years to properly establish. And of course Redditors aren't the only people I talk to about this stuff, but I like you guys. :)