ABSTRACT
This study analyzes one hundred years of empirical and rhetorical/critical scholarship in communication. The project traces the epistemological movements within the discipline’s history as developed in its scholarly publications. Such an undertaking is no easy task; as Eadie (2011) notes, communication lacks a “unified history” which requires some boundary setting from the outset. While, like Eadie, one could divide the discipline into “the speech story,” “the communication story,” and “the journalism story,” we believe that assessing the history of the discipline over a century of its development requires a contextualization made possible only when one looks at these stories in combination. Accordingly, while we recognize that journalism has a varied history of inclusion in and independence from the communication discipline proper, the archive we examined includes the major (i.e., flagship) journals that have sustained each of these threads of communications studies in its broadest sense.
