Materials for History of Rhetoric (1600-1900)

This page bookmarks sites used in "History of Rhetoric: Modern Period" (English 624). We are fortunate that historians have worked to use the Internet to address late 20th century problems of access to historical materials needed to do history of rhetoric. This page aims to circulate their work more widely. After providing connections to the live work of the course (collaborative bibs in Zotero, my developmental links in delicious, and databases available to Purdue students through the University Libraries), the page focuses on bookmarking open access aids to scholarship that can be found online. It lists: sites that aid history of rhetoric in the UK; sites focusing on history in the US; sites that distribute digitized public domain books; sites that have particular works by named authors; pointers to articles helpful in building a bibliography.


This resourse list started as a conventional course bibliography, alert to the multidisciplinary dimensions of Modern Rhetoric. You can see at the end of this file that we first gathered secondary materials and placed them in the Rhet/Comp Resource Room. Then, as the web took hold, we added reference websites and then digitized full texts.

Each year the study of modern rhetoric expands/extends its digital reach via digital archives, online exhibits, repositories of open access texts, online journals, collaborative research software, and so on. Thus, these resources are only part of the digital resources for the course. They focus on pointing to digital assets that are being freely shared.




Below. . .

  • Part 1 points to tools for day-to-day classwork.

  • Part 2 lists helpful websites [those with historical material and those that point to historical material].

  • Part 3 lists primary works available for free online.

  • Part 4 lists the secondary materials listed are articles placed in the Rhet/Comp Resource Room (along with a summary) by former students.

Part 1: Day-to-day Tools

The course also makes used of proprietary databases via the Purdue University Libraries http://www.lib.purdue.edu/: Useful for-pay journals (many are gathered online in JSTOR) and those include Rhetorica, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, Quarterly Journal of Speech, History and Theory,College English, College Composition and Communication, Eighteenth Century Studies, Philosophy and Rhetoric, History of Education Quarterly/History of Education Quarterly, just to name a few.

Important for-pay databases for historical work [links will ask Purdue students to login and not work for others]: