In the mid-1980s, when I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Michael Leff organized a series of informal summer reading groups for rhetoric graduate students. During one of those summers, at Leff’s suggestion, the groupmet weekly to enjoy some Leinekugel’s beer and discuss the founding documents of our discipline—the key articles published in the Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking from 1915 to 1923. Leff always emphasized the importance of understanding the institutional and pedagogical history of the communication field, and the exercise of reading those founding documents was, for me, formative. Thus, I appreciate enormously Professor Sproule’s effort to discover and illuminate a vital chapter in the “communication discipline’s own creation story.” His essay explores the multifaceted origins of the “quintessential modern speech book” that emerged in the early twentieth century from an eclectic theoretical and pedagogical ancestry stretching back over the previous two centuries. To Professor Sproule, the evolution of the modern public speaking text is revealing of a lively disciplinary fermentation and stands as the chief manifestation of both a new paradigm of speech pedagogy, and of a “growing confidence” in the youthful speech discipline. In the texts that emerged from this evolution, and especially in JamesWinans’s “widely influential” Public Speaking (1915), Sproule witnesses the materialization of the discipline’s rejection of its elocutionary heritage and its embrace of a mode of public address “that was plain, practical, ideafocused, extemporaneous, conversationally direct, audience-adapted, outline-prepared, and library-researched.”

Research Article| August 01 1991 Pro Militibus Oratio: John Adams's Imitation of Cicero in the Boston Massacre Trial James M. Farrell James M. Farrell Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, Horton Social Science Center, Durham, New Hampshire 03824-3586. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1991) 9 (3): 233–249. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.3.233 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James M. Farrell; Pro Militibus Oratio: John Adams's Imitation of Cicero in the Boston Massacre Trial. Rhetorica 1 August 1991; 9 (3): 233–249. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.3.233 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1991, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1991 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.