Cobb, Amanda “Powerful Medicine: The Rhetoric of Comanche Activist LaDonna Harris”

 
In this article, “Powerful Medicine: The Rhetoric of Comanche Activist LaDonna Harris,” Amanda Cobb models a solid social history of American Indian rhetoric.  Cobb begins her article by articulating the need for social histories of contemporary American Indian rhetoric because these rhetorics are being practiced by contemporary leaders and activists which are “teaching our communities [...]

Manifesto Revisited

Manifesto:  Why Study and Write Social Histories of Rhetoric?
 
            Social histories of rhetoric(s) study the use of rhetorical practices by communities and members of communities who haven’t been typically represented mainstream rhetorical history.  Working under this assumption, it is extremely important in my eyes to expand the rhetorical canon to account for a broader spectrum [...]

Progress on My Social History of Rhetorics Project

In thinking of how to organize my social history of rhetoric project, I have been tinkering with the idea of collage.  Beam essentially rewrites history through collage and montage of seemingly unrelated icons, indices, and symbols.  These techniques allow him to construct history in a nonlinear fashion–an important move for Beam since his work, in [...]

“’A Philosophy of Handicap’: The Origins of Randolph Bourne’s Radicalism” Paul K. Longmore and Paul Steven Miller

In this article, Longmore and Miller revise contemporary interpretations of Randolph Bourne’s radicalism and situate it in firmly within not only his own philosophy on disability but also the moment of the Progressive Era. Longmore and Miller claim that scholars often do not see the sociological, cultural, and political elements of disability, which they [...]

Chapter 1 of Regendering Delivery—“Readers and Rhetors: Schoolgirl’s Formal Elocutionary Instruction”—Lindal Buchanan

In this chapter, Buchanon demonstrates how the site of education can be a useful topoi for tracing gender’s influence on delivery–the fifth rhetorical canon. In all the chapters of this text, Buchanan illustrates that delivery is grounded in social context and is, in fact, contingent on an individual or group’s social environment. [...]

“An Essamplaire Essai on the Rhetoricity of Needlework Sampler-Making: A Contribution to Theorizing and Historicizing Rhetorical Praxis”

Goggin begins this article by pointing out that much scholarship in our field, particularly work in feminist and visual rhetorics, that has focused on textual artifacts emphasizes their semiotic and performative aspects. Goggin praises this work yet emphasizes the need to theorize and historicize rhetorical praxis to uncover the material practices that construct these artifacts. [...]

Carr, Carr, and Schultz–Chapter 2: Reading School Readers

Chapter Two, pages 81-116 “Reading School Readers”
As Carr, Carr, and Schultz (CCS) write in the coda toward the back of the book, “Every textbook is an archive of instruction—it holds traces of past books and traditions, sometimes literally in silent borrowings or explicit citations, and sometimes in more deeply embedded ways. It [...]

Nietzsche “On the use and abuse of history for life”

Nietzsche divides “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” into 10 sections. I summarize and comment on the forward and first six sections here. Yet, before I begin, I think it will be useful to contextualize this text. This work was written in 1873, two years after the German Empire [...]

Manifesto for Social Histories of Rhetoric

Manifesto: Why Study and Write Social Histories of Rhetoric?”
If we define social histories as the histories of everyday lives which haven’t been typically represented in mainstream histories, then I am assuming social histories of rhetoric(s) pertains to the use of rhetorical practices by communities and members of communities who haven’t been typically represented in [...]