Rhetoric Writing major takes long trek from ancient Greece to the deep South. There are easier tasks in academia than reducing the vagaries of rhetoric to a simple, concise definition.
Rhetoric is such a sweeping topic.
It was a year ago that Engdahl-Johnson began his own personal exploration of the subject matter with his first rhetoric class. His journey continued last summer when he and professor of speech Bob Withycombe, funded by a Perry Research Scholarship, traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, as scholars from around the nation and globe converged on the recently opened files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. Created by a nervous Mississippi state legislature in 1956, the Sovereignty Commission employed dozens of informants and agents to monitor and record, disrupt and impede, the emerging civil rights movement. While the winds of change whistled through the South, the commission resisted, seeking to preserve and protect a social order predicated on the exclusive and oppressive rights of white citizens. Years later state lawmakers sought to bury the commission's transgressions by having its files sealed for 50 years.