Not until English compositionhad evolved to the point where it was granting its own specialized doctoral degrees, in the 1970s, do we see the real beginnings of a scholarly tradition in composition history. Before that point, though certain related historical studies had been done in education departments and in speech departments, only Kitzhaber had explored college-level composition history in any detail. Slowly, however, the flowering scholarship turned toward historical issues.

Like such feminist historical work, early composition history was polemical history. Wallace Douglas bitingly reinterpreted Harvard's place in the teaching of writing in his "Rhetoric for the Meritocracy" essay of 1976. Again like feminist scholarship, composition history began to search for marginalized forebears, and the greatest of these, Fred Newton Scott of Michigan, was re-introduced to English compositionby Donald Stewart in a series of articles beginning in 1978. In 1980 James Berlin weighed in with articles in Freshman English News and College English that helped define the forces that had opposed Fred Scott. Borrowing a term from Richard Young (who had borrowed it from Daniel Fogarty Roots for a New Rhetoric), Berlin called the congeries of teaching methods and theories that had evolved through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries "current-traditional rhetoric." It was a term of opprobrium, and it stuck.

Beginning with Stewart and Berlin, the scholarly study of the history of composition took off. Slowly at first, then with more speed, scholars began to examine the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for materials useful to current analytical needs. In 1981 Andrea Lunsford published an essay on rhetoric in nineteenth-century Scots universities, Leo Rockas published an essay on John Genung of Amherst College, and Robert Connors published a piece on the modes of discourse, which won the CCCC's Richard Braddock Award the following year. This organizational imprimatur for historical scholarship seemed to give impetus to a whole new generation of scholars, and from 1983 through the present, historical scholarship in composition has been increasingly accepted as an essential branch of the field.

Most contemporary scholars writing on composition history were trained at the doctoral level in both literature and rhetoric, so a historical perspective and access to historiographic methods are not strange to them. Lunsford, Connors, Katherine Adams, Sharon Crowley, William F. Woods, John Brereton, David Russell, Nan Johnson, David Jolliffe, Anne Ruggles Gere, and others have all applied traditional historical methodologies to the primary and, increasingly, to the secondary sources they use and generate. Like all historians, members of this group bring varied perspectives and intentions to the scholarship they do. Some historical scholars specialize in delineating large movements and trends in composition history, while others tend toward smallerscale works or straight biography of important figures they have researched. Some prefer an attempt at neutral presentation of their findings, while others are openly polemical, operating from a declared Marxist or vitalist or social-constructionist point of view. In a fairly short period of time, composition history has come to be a microcosm of the larger field of historical scholarship.