ABSTRACT
Traces “rhetoric” beginning in the classical Greco-Roman era through a few key referential/definitional moments during the long nineteenth century to its scholarly resurgence in the mid-twentieth century New Rhetorics and continuing to the present day. Focus is on the most formative moments in the study and practice of rhetoric, especially those that mark the radical and substantial shift from the sense of rhetoric as public argument and ornamentation to the marriage of rhetoric and writing instruction that becomes embedded in the university system in the United States.
