Adams Sherman Hill

Adams Sherman Hill (30 January 1833 – 25 December 1910) was an American newspaper journalist and rhetorician. As Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard University from 1876 to 1904, Hill oversaw and implemented curriculum that came to effect first-year composition in classrooms across the United States. His most widely known works include The Principles of Rhetoric, Foundations of Rhetoric, and Our English. Life and career Hill was born in Boston, Massachusetts. After the death of his father in 1838 and his mother in 1846, Hill was raised by his uncle, Alonzo Hill. His uncle encouraged Hill to become a minister, but he chose instead to attend Harvard, graduating with a law degree in 1855. After working as a law reporter and night editor for the New York Tribune until 1872, he returned to Harvard to become an assistant professor of rhetoric. In 1876, he was promoted to Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, a position he held until 1904. Reconstruction-Era education and culture Hill's tenure as Boylston Professor coincided with a widely growing cultural desire for education in Reconstruction-Era America. The number of colleges in America, particularly small, religious colleges, rose rapidly after 1865, and universities across the country saw their student populations increase in turn. As the industrial revolution began to move more and more people to cities, many individuals saw college as an opportunity to make themselves marketable for jobs. This influx of students, coupled with the expanded number of composition programs across the country, meant that more and more teachers were brought in from secondary schools to teach these newly created composition classes. Overworked, teaching students who frequently needed more help with their compositions, (because they were generally not as classically educated as the “elite” students colleges had traditionally been set up to teach) composition instructors began to seek help in the form of textbooks. This cultural expansion, along with newly improved printing presses, helped give rise to the expanded usage of textbooks in American composition classrooms.