This fall, I’m scheduled to teach an undergraduate history of rhetoric to 1900 course, and the course seems to generally be taught using a history of rhetoric textbook supplemented with selected primary texts rather than an anthology of primary texts such as Bizzell and Herzberg’s The Rhetorical Tradition or Brummett’s Reading Rhetorical Theory. Since we don’t offer a history of rhetoric course at the undergraduate level, I’ve done some poking around on the Web and library and have narrowed my search down to three books:

• James Herrick’s The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction
  
• Thomas Conley’s Rhetoric in the European Tradition
• Craig Smith’s Rhetoric and Human Consciousness: A History

While the Herrick book seems to be widely used, it’s just too expensive. (At $81, I might as well have students buy the Bizzell and Herzberg text). Smith’s book intrigues me because it has a chapter on rhetoric’s emergence from myth and narrative before focusing on Greek rhetoric, and because it has a section on Marshall McLuhan. However, even before I learned that Conley’s book has been used recently for this course, I’ve been leaning towards it largely because of its price.

Anyone familiar with any of these texts and have any suggestions or comments? Or do you think I ought to be considering or reconsidering another option?