ABSTRACT
Given that it is still, as a fi eld, relatively young, still (in many places) intellectually and professionally marginalized, and still mostly presentist in orientation, it is surprising that composition-rhetoric has become, over the last generation, so self-conscious about its own history.1 Nonetheless, the evidence is unmistakable: for every graduate seminar on theory, research, or pedagogy offered in our doctoral programs, there’s one on history. Scholarly articles and monographs on historical topics proliferate. And historical methodologies are increasingly deployed in increasingly sophisticated ways by scholars in the fi eld, often in the interest of better understanding the discipline itself. Compositionists are now some of the best institutional archivists and oral historians in the academy, and their work has provided us with an incomparably rich understanding of our own past. “Without quite setting out to do so,” John Brereton wrote over a decade ago, “historians of composition have created the single most impressive body of knowledge about any discipline in higher education” (xiv).
