Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

[W]hat happened to rhetoric in American colleges
between 1820 and 1900 is, in the realm of that
discipline, remarkable: a 2,500-year-old
intellectual tradition adopts an almost completely
new base of theory, a variety of novel pedagogies, an
almost completely changed audience and constituency,
and a wholly new cultural status in less than eighty
years. Certainly other disciplines changed, grew,
were refined during the nineteenth century, but none
so startlingly or so thoroughly. Surely great
changes must have occurred in more than just the
discipline in order to cause such a tremendous shift.
Doctor Erwin Ackerknecht, medical historian and author of A
Short History of Medicine, attempts to explain those “very
deep cultural changes” of Connors:
The United States was a new country; yet its roots
were firmly grounded in an older civilization. It
was faced with the problem of assimilating as rapidly
as possible the attainments of the mother-countries
of Europe. Consequently, the problem of education
and educational standards – of the adequate
transmission of the best existing knowledge – was of
prime importance in the [this] formative period.
(218)
Although Ackerknecht was writing with medicine in mind, his
meaning applies nonetheless to rhetoric. America was a nation
that was still in its veritable infancy when compared to its
Western forebears across the cold Atlantic, in particular
England, its former sovereign. It was trying to not simply
assert its own identity on the world stage, but, more
critically, ascertain what exactly that “American identity”
would be - should be - here at home. America was desperately
trying to define itself. Out of that, boundaries were being
drawn and redrawn, narrowing further and further what was
perceived as the “truth” of the world, of reality, and this new
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