Placing History

CD-ROM contains: Four Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and interactive mapping exercises, some of which extend the scholarly material and addresses new issues related to historical GIS.

Pre-1950s composition history, if analyzed with the right conceptual tools, can pluralize and clarify our understanding of the relationship between the writing of college students and the writing’s physical, social, and discursive surroundings.

Collects essays about historical questions that can now be answered through geographic information systems, as well as the problems and limitations of using GIS technology.

PERSPECTIVES ON WRITING Series Editors, Susan H. McLeod and Rich Rice In PLACING THE HISTORY OF COLLEGE WRITING: STORIES FROM THE INCOMPLETE ARCHIVE, Nathan Shepley argues that pre-1950s composition history, if analyzed with the right conceptual tools, can pluralize and clarify our understanding of the relationship between the writing of college students and the writing's physical, social, and discursive surroundings. Even if the immediate outcome of student writing is to generate academic credit, Shepley shows, the writing does more complex rhetorical work. It gives students chances to uphold or adjust institutional codes for student behavior, allows students and their literacy sponsors to respond to sociopolitical issues in a city or state, enables faculty and administrators to create strategic representations of institutional or program identities, and connects people across disciplines, occupations, and geographic locations. Shepley argues that even if many of today's composition scholars and instructors work at institutions that lack extensive historical records of the kind usually preferred by composition historians, those scholars and teachers can mine their institutional collections for signs of the various contexts with which student writing dealt. NATHAN SHEPLEY is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Rhetoric and Composition. In addition to composition history, his specialization areas include composition pedagogy and ecological and neosophistic theories of writing. His articles have appeared in Composition Studies, Enculturation, Composition Forum, and Open Words: Access and English Studies.

History's Place explores nostalgia as one of the defining aspects of the relationship between France and North Africa. Dr. Seth Graebner argues that France's most important colony developed a historical consciousness through literature, and that post-colonial writers revised it while retaining its dominant effect.

Spaces, too, have a history. And history always takes place in spaces. But what do historians mean when they use the word "spaces"? And how can spaces be historically investigated? Susanne Rau provides a survey of the history of Western concepts of space, opens up interdisciplinary approaches to the phenomenon of space in fields ranging from physics and geography to philosophy and sociology, and explains how historical spatial analysis can be methodologically and conceptually conceived and carried out in practice. The case studies presented in the book come from the fields of urban history, the history of trade, and global history including the history of cartography, but its analysis is equally relevant to other fields of inquiry. This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to the theory and methodology of historical spatial analysis. Supported by Open Access funds of the University of Erfurt