Welcome to Our Collaborative Rhetorical Timeline

This project grew out of a class at the University of Wyoming: English 2440/Survey in Rhetoric and Writing, in spring 2023. The course aimed to give students a broad survey in how rhetoric has been defined and practiced over the course of history. To accomplish this goal, we traveled twice through about 4,000 years of speakers and theorists, with Enheduanna as our earliest known writer and ChatGPT as the most recent to emerge on the scene. For the first half of the semester, I assigned readings, delivered lectures, and guided discussions. Then, for the second half, students each took a turn choosing a rhetorician, identifying materials we could review to learn more about them, generating response questions for those materials, then leading the class in examining and connecting those ideas across time. 

As the culminating activity in the class, each student created a space for their rhetorician on this timeline. We've divided the site into the same eras used in The Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, a standard text in rhetoric classes. These eras are not clean and simple dividers. For example, John Locke was born at the end of the Renaissance (1632) and was important in the move into the Enlightenment. Therefore, he's a kind of "shoulder" rhetorician between the eras. When this happened, we used our best judgment to make a decision on where to put the location on the timeline. 

This is the first round of our project. Students were given specific guidelines to follow in creating their entries, including the requirement that all their sources be open-access. They were also tasked with synthesizing the information from their sources into the biographies they wrote. While they are paraphrasing (rather than quoting) the sources linked for their rhetorician, I asked them not to include a bunch of citations. We wanted the entries to be readable first and foremost. Please assume that all information used in their profiles is taken from the sources linked for more information. 

My goal is to continue adding to this timeline each semester I teach the course. I hope you find something interesting here, and I close with a big shoutout to these student authors, who formed a wonderful community and taught us all quite a lot about rhetoric over time. 

Thank you for visiting our site!