Notes Towards an Introduction (book)

Donahue, Patricia. "Disciplinary Histories: A Meditation on Beginnings." In Local Histories: Reading the Archives of Composition. Eds. Patricia Donahue and Gretchen Flesher Moon. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. 220-236.

Gold, David. "Remapping Revisionist Historiography." CCC 64.1 (2012): 15-34.

Kirsch, Gesa E. & Liz Rohan. Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 2008. 

Key Terms:

Beginnings
institutional microhistory (Gold, Rhetoric at the Margins, p. 22)

Key Quotes:

Gold writes: “Further, we must better incorporate recent advances in recovery work, thus beginning with the assumption of a complex, multivocal past as our starting point for historical inquiry.” (Gold, “Remapping Revisionist Historiography” p. 17)

This quote does some important work for me in that it allows me to say what I want to say, which is that there is this story that is told around the tribe about Donald Murray and the process revolution, essentially a "great man" history of the department, that Murray arrived and things just got better and improved, and that he was/is responsible for the positive changes and that he invented much of it himself. I wanted to tell a more complex, multi-vocal story of our past and that's what I'm doing...

What about Miller's concerns in his book about how we as a field have failed to respond to our various publics, etc. The opportunities we've missed, etc?

Robin Varnum provides a nice context for reconsidering the period 1900-1960 in her article here. This might be useful for contextualizing what came before Murray and the grand revolution and showing how it emerged out of longer running threads. 

A methodological concern--the use of course descriptions and listing. Apparently Susan Miller addresses this in Textual Carnivals, see p. 66-67 and/or Tirabassi's use of her words on p. 118-119 in diss.