This article examines Hunton and Johnson’s Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, which recounts their WWI YMCA service in France supporting Black troops. TCW exemplifies a long tradition of Black civic pedagogy, drawing on prophetic and empirical strategies to teach audiences that Black experience and racial justice are foundational to American democracy. Deploying the Black jeremiad, it exposes racial inequities and envisions a racially just future; deploying testifying, it combines narrative, reportage, and documentary evidence to empirically support its findings of white racism, Black heroism, and French egalitarianism. These strategies suggest possibilities and limitations for future practice.

While scholars have examined racial dynamics within the US suffrage movement, we have fewer rhetorical treatments of how Black citizens argued for suffrage, particularly for a Black public. This essay examines a 1915 symposium published in the Crisis, featuring 26 African American rhetors. It finds that even as these rhetors deploy available commonplaces of contemporary suffrage arguments, they also draw from racial experience to claim space for Black women’s citizenship within a body politic that figures the ideal citizen as male and white. These arguments, moreover, cleave along gender lines: the men predominantly argue from the topos of justice and ground their claims in abstract democratic principles; the women predominantly argue from expediency and ground their claims in embodied racial and gendered experience. In doing so, they challenge and reshape dominant expediency claims based on white supremacy and reassert the links between women’s suffrage and universal suffrage.

We surveyed 803 undergraduates at a large public university about their online writing practices. We find that despite wide platform access, students typically write in a narrow range of spaces for limited purposes and audiences, with a majority expressing rhetorical concerns about writing in digital spaces. These findings suggest rich opportunities for writing instructors to better help students negotiate the terrain of online public discourse.

Though composition studies has long sought to leverage new technologies of literacy to help students go public, we remain anxious about our ability to do so, as students commonly enter our classrooms already composing for diverse public audiences in a variety of digital contexts. Yet students, too, are often anxious about these new modes of composition, which circulate in a destabilized rhetorical environment where traditional understandings of authority, argument, and audience no longer hold. This article identifies five topoi of this new rhetorical landscape— presence , persistence , permeability , promiscuity, and power —describing the anxieties and affordances they present for student writers, the dispositions toward writing they foster, and the challenges and opportunities they pose for composition. This framework provides a critical vocabulary for compositionists seeking to help students negotiate emerging networked publics.

The historical actors at the center of Kimberly Harrison’s The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and Confederate Persuasion are not easy figures to identify with, but they are worth studyi...

Although rhetoric and composition has long engaged with emerging digital technologies, historians in our field have not yet in large part entered these conversations. In this special issue, we present four essays by scholars building digital historiographic projects, each of which directly addresses values and concerns that lie at the heart of critical practice in rhetoric and composition: engaging underrepresented and marginalized communities; taking up critically important questions regarding historiographic investigation; and emphasizing collaboration among both scholars and stakeholder groups. Together, these essays contribute significantly to the still nascent conversation regarding how the digital intersects with the historical.

Rhetoric and composition historiography has recently undergone a rapid transformation as scholars have complicated and challenged earlier narratives by examining diverselocal histories and alternative rhetorical traditions. This revisionist scholarship has in turn created new research challenges, as scholars must now demonstrate connectionsbetween the local and larger scholarly conversations; assume a complex, multivocal past as the starting point for historical inquiry; and resist the temptation to reinscribeeasy binaries, taxonomies, and master narratives, even when countering them. This essay identifies and analyzes these challenges, posits responses to them, and suggestsexemplars for future practice.

In this article, I test claims made about rhetorical education for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining Florida State College for Women (FSCW), one of eight public women’s colleges in the South. I recover the voices of instructors and students by looking both at the interweaving strands of literature, journalism, and speech instruction in the English curriculum and how students publicly represented themselves through writing. I argue that the rhetorical environment at FSCW created a robust climate of expression for students that complicates our understanding of the development of women’s education in speaking and writing.

The author offers a local, institutional microhistory of the work of William Leonidas Mayo, a figure who both exemplifies and complicates some of our more recent concepts of student-centered pedagogy, both to enrich our understanding of our disciplinary history and to illuminate trends in English studies of continuing interest to contemporary teachers and scholars.

This essay examines the pedagogical practices of the poet, civil rights activist, andteacher Melvin B. Tolson who taught at Wiley College from 1923 to 1947. Tolson’s complex classroom style, which mixed elements of classical, African American, and current-traditional rhetoric, produced a pedagogy that was at once conservative, progressive, and radical, inspiring his students to academic achievement and social action. Tolson demonstrates that it is possible to instruct students in the norms of the academy without sacrificing their home voices or identities.

This essay examines rhetorical instruction and student writing at Texas Woman's University, a public women's college. Unlike their peers at elite, private women's colleges in the East, students at TWU were consistently encouraged to write and speak in public forums, to take part in political discourse, and to think of themselves as rhetors. The vocational focus of the school meant that the campus could never serve as a cloister, and the ever-present support of activist clubwomen gave students powerful role models for participating in the public sphere.

Lucifer Rising (Yet Again) American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty by Michael W. Cuneo. New York: Doubleday, 2001. 301 + xvpp. Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism by Gareth J. Medway. New York: New York University Press, 2001. 465 + ix pp. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media by Bill Ellis. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000. 332 + xix pp. The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition by Jacqueline. Bacon. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. 291 + xiv pp. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric by Thomas O. Sloane, Editor in Chief. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. xii 837 pp. Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres by Rosa A. Eberly. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 199 + xvii pp.

Writing in A Milieu of Utility: The Move to Technical Communication in American Engineering Programs, 1850–1950 by Teresa C. Kynell, 2nd ed. Stamford, CT: Ablex, 2000. 134 + xix pp. Rhetorical Figures in Science by Jeanne Fahnestock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xiv + 248 pp.

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