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Preface
- Southern Illinois University Press
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ix P R E F A C E : R E V I S I O N I N G H I S T O R Y All politics, Tip O’Neill famously declared, is local. The same might be said for history. National trends intersect with and often emerge from local communities and constituencies, whose experiences can complicate and confound received historical narratives. Unfortunately, local histories often get erased in the process of history making. In rhetoric and composition studies, recent historical scholarship has begun to reverse this trend. Yet what John C. Brereton acknowledged over a decade ago in his introduction to The Origins of Composition Studies remains true today; we still know too little about the classroom experiences of students and educators at Southern, religious, women’s, working-class, and historically black colleges. More troublingly, our knowledge has often been filtered through a myth of rhetorical decline, an assumption that innovation begins at elite institutions, and a too-strict adherence to an epistemological taxonomy that does not do full justice to the range of pedagogical practices in diverse institutions. The stories of such schools need to be told and not simply to represent the experiences of once-neglected communities or to satisfy a sense of historical injustice but to offer a more nuanced and representative picture of the past. Though at the margins of historical consciousness, these schools are far from marginal. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, significant numbers of rural, working-class, female, and black students were attending college. In 1920, 47% of college students were women (Newcomer 46), a figure that would not again be equaled until 1976. By 1900, over twenty-two hundred black students had received college degrees (Negro Year Book, 1941–46 299); by 1937 over thirty-five thousand black students were enrolled in black colleges and universities (Jenkins 118), creating the core of a new black middle class that would lay the groundwork for the civil rights era. Under the auspices of the Morrill Acts, dozens of state universities and industrial colleges were created throughout the South and the West, greatly expanding opportunities for higher education to white and black students of both sexes, while numerous normal schools, both public and private, brought higher education to rural communities throughout the nation. The histories of these schools are our own, and they deserve detailed examination. This book examines rhetorical education—reading, writing, and speaking instruction—at three institutions neglected by previous historical study: Wiley College in Marshall, Texas (1873), a classically based, private, black liberal arts college; the public Texas Woman’s University in Denton (1901), at one time the nation’s largest residential college for women; and East Texas Normal College in Commerce (1889), an independent teachertraining school and at one time home to the state’s largest summer teachers’ program. Each represents an important source of information about the development of higher education in America. All are in the same state, and all were founded to serve disenfranchised communities, yet they display a remarkable range of diversity in faculties, student bodies, institutional missions, and curricula and thus are perfect testing grounds for extant historical claims about the development of rhetoric and writing instruction in American colleges. I chose these schools both because they provide a cross-section of the range of institutions that served American students in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and because each had archival resources substantial enough to sustain in-depth inquiry. Each of these schools speaks to an important emerging area of research in rhetoric and composition historiography—historically black colleges and universities and African American education, women’s colleges and women’s education, and normal schools—and, as I hope this study demonstrates, these traditions speak in turn to each other. Though each of these schools offered its students singular, locally enacted experiences, each also belonged to a rich, alternative tradition of rhetorical education in America. Black colleges, women’s colleges, teacher-training colleges, and other institutions did not simply adopt, respond to, or even transform pedagogies practiced elsewhere; they created their own. I have three main goals: (1) to recover important histories that would otherwise be lost and give voice to the experiences of students and educators of a diverse past; (2) to complicate and challenge the master narratives of rhetoric and composition history and the ideological assumptions that underlie them; and (3) to demonstrate persistent connections between the past and the present in order to help develop richer...