Rhet/comp and revolution: History, rhetoric and pedagogy in colonial and contemporary American higher education

"Rhet/Comp and Revolution" is a history of language-arts instruction in the colonial American colleges with particular focus on the College of Philadelphia, the College of New Jersey, and Yale. It is also a map of the rhetorical forms (topics) used by contemporary scholars to write histories of rhetoric and composition. While offering detailed descriptions of the above colleges' language-arts curricula in their political and historical contexts, "Rhet/Comp and Revolution" describes and performs three rhetorical topics prevalent in contemporary scholarship: the rhetoric of struggle, the market, and community. Each topic is analyzed as a pedagogical rhetoric shaping the values and practices that contemporary teachers accept and apply in their classrooms. As such, each rhetorical topic directly affects contemporary higher education by shaping the kinds of teachers that university instructors become. By insisting that historical scholarship directly affects teaching practices, this dissertation challenges the traditionally accepted teaching/scholarship binary and illustrates that the disciplinary histories written by people in contemporary universities necessarily have pedagogical effects in the present. Since historical scholarship shapes contemporary classroom practices, it can be strategically (re)used in the struggle towards a more democratic and egalitarian classroom environment.