Revisionist historiography and rhetorical tradition(s)

AT ONE TIME, not so long ago, people in our line of academic work used to talk about something called the "rhetorical tradition." It is unlikely that many of us could give a precise definition of the phrase, but we invoked it with unreflective confidence and assumed that our colleagues would understand what we meant. In fact, the term rhetorical tradition represented something more than an elegant synonym for "the history of rhetoric." It had a resonance that suggested not just what we studied but who we were in the academy. The history was our history.