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Kathleen J. Turner (Ed.), DOING RHETORICAL HISTORY. CONCEPTS AND CASES. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998; pp. xi + 310, $39.95 hardcover, ISBN: 081730925X.
This useful volume addresses the breach that has been left in communication studies by the theoretical turn and offers a text for speech communication departments that have been sending their graduate students elsewhere for instruction in historiography. With its emphasis on original archival research, concise explanations of approaches for doing rhetorical history, and illustrative case studies, this is a well-organized and eloquently written collection of essays that codifies the state of the art of rhetorical history in the communication field today.
The table of contents is who's who of contemporary scholars from James R. Andrews to David Zarefsky, with contributions from Ronald H. Carpenter, E. Culpepper Clark and Raymie E. McKerrow, Bruce Gronbeck, James Jasinski, Kathleen J. Turner and other outstanding researchers. The book is an outgrowth of their concern with the second-class status that has been accorded rhetorical history recently and of a series of convention panels and...