blatant

What are blogs if they aren't a little (or a lot) self-indulgent?

Ch-ch-ch-check it out: Donahue and Moon's Local Histories: Reading the Archives of Composition is finally out. I love the premise of this book: developing counter-narratives to the familiar Harvard and Michigan stories that purport to reveal the origins of composition in the U.S. The counter-narratives take readers to historically black colleges and two-year colleges and other sites that historicize the discipline in new ways.

Thanks to editors Pat and Gretchen for including me in the volume. I contribute "William Rainey Harper and the Ideology of Service at Junior Colleges," and use the story of Harper ("father of the junior college movement") to analyze how open-admissions schools use the concept of "service" rhetorically.

As the man once said, "these things take time." First composed in 2001, this essay evolved from a chapter of my dissertation. Glad the book, at long last, has made contact with daylight. Congrats to Pat and Gretchen...I know the thinking, the labor, and the patience that go into such a volume.