This book recounts the story of the people who have studied and taught composition in American colleges since the early 19th century. It shows where many of today's teachers' practices and assumptions about writing come from, and it translates what theories and techniques of teaching have, over time, indicated about attitudes toward students, language, and life. Chapters in the book are: (1) Gender Influences: Composition-Rhetoric as an Irenic Rhetoric; (2) Shaping Tools: Textbooks and the Development of Composition-Rhetoric; (3) Composition-Rhetoric, Grammar, and Mechanical Correctness; (4) Licensure, Disciplinary Identity, and Workload in Composition-Rhetoric; (5) Discourse Taxonomies in Composition-Rhetoric; (6) Style Theory and Static Abstractions; and (7) Invention and Assignments in Composition-Rhetoric. (Contains extensive notes and a bibliography.) (NKA)