Examines the far-reaching cultural implications of a kind of writing not usually deemed culturally significant--school assignments. Studies 44 papers written in 1898 by senior class members of the Platteville Normal School in southwestern Wisconsin assigned to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Wisconsin’s statehood. Examines the cultural work accomplished by these student writers in their own time and place.

This study examines composition at public Midwestern normal schools, the teacher training institutions of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It argues that the unique social environment, educational aims, and intellectual traditions of the normal school gave rise to attitudes about composition theory, methods, teachers, and students that are much more compatible with composition’s contemporary ethic than those associated with the elite Eastern colleges where the origins of composition have most often been studied.