Page xi →Acknowledgments

Special gratitude goes to two friends and mentors, Jess Enoch and Steph Ceraso. Jess offered extensive and detailed feedback on multiple drafts of the project in its earlier stages. Her generosity as a reader, in every respect, has been an incredible gift. I am equally grateful for the model of her engagement with the ideas of others in her own scholarship. Jess is a feminist mentor extraordinaire, and this book and my career would not be possible without her guidance and example.

Steph has been my peer mentor since the earliest days our time together as graduate students. As we both looked ahead to our first year on the tenure track, we set monthly goals for working on our first book manuscripts, one month and one chapter at a time. We met every other week to check our progress, and Steph read and offered feedback on every page of the draft book manuscript. Throughout the process she has been there to listen, strategize in the face of potential roadblocks, and celebrate forward movement.

This project developed throughout my time at the University of Pittsburgh, Old Dominion University, and Penn State University. As a graduate student at Pitt, I was fortunate to find a challenging yet supportive intellectual community in which to begin the archival research that grounds this book. Along with Jess, Don Bialostosky, Jean Ferguson Carr, and Nancy Glazener all offered important feedback on the early research. I am grateful to Don for conversations about arrangement and style that continue to direct my writing. I also thank Don for encouraging words about academic life that he somehow knew to offer exactly when needed. While Jean and Nancy’s contributions are numerous, I especially thank them for the benefit of their expertise in archival methods and nineteenth-century U.S. culture. Other faculty also offered useful feedback as I pursued my interests in queer studies and letter-writing manuals during coursework. Here I thank Mark Lynn Anderson, Nick Coles, and Lester Olson. I also appreciate fellow grad students who joined me for writing dates and/or enlivening discussions about everything from archival research to queer theory: Erin Anderson, Page xii →Julie Beaulieu, Jean Bessette, Nathan Bryant, Jessica Isaac, Colleen Jankovich, Danielle Koupf, Peter Moe, Brie Owen, Dahliani Reynolds, and Stacey Waite. At Pitt my writing time and travel to conduct archival research were supported by an Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship as well as a grant from the College of Arts and Sciences.

I began to develop the book manuscript while an assistant professor at ODU, where several people provided crucial support. Significant portions of the manuscript materialized during weekly writing dates with Liz Groeneveld, and I am grateful for her company, shared experience, and friendship. I thank Drew Lopenzina for fielding my many questions about the process of writing and publishing a book. I am especially grateful to Lindal Buchanan, who provided feedback on the book proposal as well as mentorship that facilitated my transition from dissertator to book writer. Thanks go to Dana Heller, Maura Hametz, and Elizabeth Zanoni, who each offered research and publication guidance at key junctures, as well as Sarah Spangler, who provided assistance with secondary research. For their general encouragement and collegiality as I developed the manuscript, I thank Kevin DePew, Candace Epps-Robertson, David Metzger, Kevin Moberly, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Alison Reed, Dan Richards, and Julia Romberger. My work on the project while at ODU was supported by a Summer Research Grant from the College of Arts and Letters, another Summer Research Fellowship from the University’s Office of Research, and a Robin L. Hixon Fellowship from the Department of English.

I completed the book project while in my current position at Penn State, where I am again delighted to find a vibrant intellectual community. I thank Denise Solomon and the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences for welcoming and encouraging this work. Thank you to my colleagues in communication science—Jim Dillard, John Gastil, Erina MacGeorge, Jon Nussbaum, Lijiang Shen, Rachel Smith, and Tim Worley—for posing questions that help me to think about the interplay of interpersonal and political communication from new perspectives. I am also grateful to my fellow rhetoricians—Steve Browne, Anne Demo, Rosa Eberly, Jeremy Engels, Michele Kennerly, Abe Khan, Mary Stuckey, Brad Vivian, and Kirt Wilson—for their questions and comments about the project. It is a real treat to be surrounded by and learning from such outstanding scholars of rhetoric. Thank you especially to Michele for copious conversation about book production and publication processes. For other conversations that inform my thinking about rhetoric and archives, I thank my colleagues in the Center for Humanities and Information and the Department of English: Cheryl Glenn, Debbie Hawhee, Eric Hayot, and John Russell. I also thank the College of Liberal Arts and Department of Communication Arts and Sciences for the research summer salary and course release that supported my time when completing the final manuscript revisions.

Page xiii →Like all archival research projects, this one has relied absolutely on the work of archivists, special collections staff, and other historians. For their support as I conducted archival research, I thank William Daw, in Special Collections at the University of Pittsburgh; Richard Malley and Diana McCain, from the Connecticut Historical Society; and Stephen Ross, in Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives. I also thank Stephen Ross as well as Jeanann Croft Haas and Andrea Rapacz for additional assistance when I was navigating permissions and questions of public domain. For their groundbreaking research on letter-writing manuals, Addie Brown, Rebecca Primus, and Albert Dodd—as well as their encouragement of my work—I thank Jane Donawerth, Farrah Jasmine Griffin, Karen Hansen, Nan Johnson, Jonathan Katz, and Mary Anne Trasciatti. For the inspiration and model of his queer rhetorical and historical work, I am grateful to Chuck Morris.

At the University of South Carolina Press, I thank former acquisitions editor Jim Denton for his early support of the project and his selection of excellent readers. Both of the anonymous reviewers for this project provided constructive feedback that has made the book stronger. Also at USC Press, I thank former acting director Linda Haines Fogle and managing editor Bill Adams for their direction and guidance while seeing the project through to the production stage.

Portions of this book are derived, in part, from an article published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, in February of 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02773945.2013.861009. I thank former RSQ editor Jim Jasinski and the anonymous reviewers for editorial guidance and feedback; I also thank current editor Susan Jarratt for assistance with acknowledgment procedures.

Speaking more personally, I would like to thank my mom, Robin Mosher, who read to me early and often and has always told me I can do anything I dream of and work for. Thank you, mom, for continuing to accept, love, and celebrate me even as my life and work took perhaps unexpected turns. Thank you for inspiring me with your example, as a true lifelong learner who remains curious and open to new experiences and perspectives. I also want to thank the chosen family and queer community—too many to name here—who have long challenged my thinking in productive ways, kept me going through uncertain periods, and cheered on my devotion to research and writing. For showing interest in this particular project, I thank Dee Giffin Flaherty and Bette Hughes. We miss you, Bette.

My greatest thanks goes to my spouse, Jess Hughes Garrity. Jess asked smart questions about my scholarship from our first date; traveled with me to the Connecticut Historical Society and, when I was running low on time my last day there, assisted with the research; checked and rechecked my citations, bibliography, and notes; listened to and offered feedback on many iterations of this work Page xiv →in presentation form; and took care of countless household and travel-related tasks that freed up my time and energy for research and writing. More important, Jess, you are the constant source of love, support, and sheer fun that makes this writing possible and my life pleasurable. May this book also be a love letter to you.