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Contributors to this symposium recall and reflect on changes of mind they have experienced, noting the relationship of these to larger concerns of English studies as a profession.

Reviews of: “Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location” by Lisa Ede; “Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies” edited by Andrea A. Lunsford and Lahoucine Ouzgane; “Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference” by Nedra Reynolds.

“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any person who is the head of a family … shall … be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands, upon which said person may have filed a preemption claim. …” So begins the Homestead Act of 1862, signed into law on the 20th of May by President Abraham Lincoln. The work of this extraordinary piece of writing is well known: more than 270 million acres of public land were parceled out to private citizens before the act’s repeal in 1976. Famously, the Homestead Act encouraged widespread Euramerican settlement of the western states and territories, but in so doing, it accelerated the infamous expropriation of land from native peoples and intensified federal initiatives that hastened their relocation, confinement, and genocide.

It is not uncommon to find literacy figured as “toxic” in discussions of its power to regulate and discipline social behavior. The author's aim in this article is to move from metaphor to material as he explores the toxicity inherent in the manufacturing processes that make print available for mass consumption. He argues that over the past century, the demand for print in certain regions of the United States, primarily the North and West, spurred the growth of commercial papermaking—and the spread of devastating mill pollution—in the South, where demand for print has historically lagged. He suggests that one result of this pollution has been the weakening of social institutions that typically promote and value normative forms of literate activity. With the industries that enable the mass circulation of print now going global, this pattern of uneven and unjust literacy development may well be repeated.

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Taps research in American studies to learn more about rhetoric and writing instruction in post-Revolutionary America. Merges the separate (and gendered) histories of early 19th-century American rhetoric, breaking down the separate spheres in contemporary historical and literary scholarship. Examines civic rhetoric found in texts that represent women’s schooling.

Recently, rhetoricians have engaged themselves in the project of revising histories of nineteenth-century American so as to account for the practices of women. We wish to enlarge the scope of this project to include the late eighteenth century. Yet, to discover women's place in (or outside of) the rhetorical tradition in late eighteenth-century America, we cannot turn to familiar sources: for example, the college curricula that schooled early political and religious leaders. From this particular schooling, women were excluded. Nor can we study those textbooks that promoted reading and writing as commercial skills. Women were, for the most part, scarce in this realm as well.' Rather, for women there developed a kind of rhetoric of use apart from other instrumental and secular literacies that were, in the late eighteenth century, practicable mainly by men.2

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