| Through most of the nineteenth century, the concept of eloquence decisively shaped the curriculum of American higher education. Eloquent speech was associated with aesthetic, moral, and intellectual refinement, and was widely believed to be both the child and the protector of American liberty. In order to promote eloquence, nineteenth-century colleges emphasized the study of elocution, oratory, and rhetoric.;By 1900, however, the concept of eloquence had virtually disappeared as a distinctive goal in American higher education. The once robust studies of elocution, oratory, and rhetoric only barely survived in the twentieth-century colleges and universities. This seismic shift in educational priorities was an indication of a radical transformation of American sensibilities regarding the norms and relative importance of public discourse.;The advocates of elocution, oratory, and rhetoric tried to retain a central place for nineteenth-century concepts of public discourse in American higher education, but failed. Their failure, however, highlights the nature of the cultural forces that were altering American habits of communication. This dissertation, then, traces the fate of eloquence in American higher education as manifested in the fields of elocution, oratory, and rhetoric from 1892-1925.;The materials reviewed include the proceedings of the National Association of Elocutionists and of the Modern Language Association; articles in Education, Atlantic Monthly, The Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking, Educational Review, English Journal, and other scholarly and popular periodicals; textbooks on rhetoric and elocution; anthologies of oratory published around 1900; Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres; John Quincy Adams' Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory; James Spear Loring's Hundred Boston Orators; Edward G. Parker's The Golden Age of American Oratory; the James Milton O'Neill Papers; and relevant secondary literature.;The study finds that the concepts of "effective communication" and "public speaking" displaced eloquence, elocution, oratory, and rhetoric in the American academy early in the twentieth century. While these new concepts served both egalitarian and practical ends, the abandonment of eloquence signalled an end to the academy's historic commitment to the improvement of oral discourse in the public sphere. |
