The focus moved away from oratorical because of “the growth of individualism as a central cultural value and the increasing specialization of knowledge leading to a similarly specialized academic discourse” (8). There was a move to “secularism…of a people who insisted upon assigning moral responsibility to a conscience alone. Though the nineteenth century, religion in the United States became less a public concern of institutions and more the private matter of individual conscience” (13). As for education, in the early 1800s, there was a belief of the “unity of knowledge’ such that an educated person was expected to know everything being taught; this meant the professors taught all subjects. As more students came to universities, “it became necessary to divide the curriculum among a larger number of people and hence possible to divide it into a larger number of more formally differentiated disciplines” (18).
“This transformation in the motivation of rhetoric in America during the nineteenth century suggest a diminishing ability of American public to function collectively – for us, one of the losses. However, the emergence of these specialized communities gave access to the theory and practice of public discourse to people who had never had access before – for us, one of the gains” (6).
The editors and writers of this book frame their arguments through the concept of transformation, as conceived by Kenneth Burke. Transformation is “a process through which ‘the position at the start can eventually be seen in terms of the new motivation encountered enroute” (3). This means that “while such a change in motivation may appear to observers (such as historians) as ‘a kind of jolt or inconsistency,’ to those who experienced the change it appeared to be simply the natural progress of things” (3). The editors emphasizes that the beginning point of a historical narrative should not be consider an origin (4). Importantly, they state that narrative privileges some views and people while ignoring others. The chapters in this collection help to expose some of the views and people that are ignored in Clark and Halloran’s introduction (5).