In the archives of composition: Writing and rhetoric in high schools and normal schools

Abstract

This is a collection of essays on composition instruction and practice at the two institutions that trained the majority of U.S. composition teachers and students during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: secondary schools and normal colleges. This anthology provides readers with new and revisionary narratives of composition-rhetoric’s history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so by drawing from a broad array of archival and documentary sources, spanning 130 years of writing instruction in the U.S. This collection provides historical accounts of writing instruction within contexts often overlooked by current historical scholarship. Taken together, the chapters begin to recover how high school composition teachers and English education programs responded to institutional and local influences, political movements, and pedagogical innovations over more than a century of writing instruction.