Drafts of an essay written by Dr. Nicholas Cripe, a professor of speech and a debate club coach at Butler University, about the history of debate at Butler from 1879 to 1910. It consists of three different drafts of the paper, the first one having multiple annotations and the second being the same document without the annotations. The third copy appears to be the final draft. The last document is entitled “The Butler Debate Tradition 1879-1979” and refers to Dr. Cripe in the third person, which may indicate that it was not written by him. Cripe takes much of the inspiration for this work from former student of his, Cheryn Heinen and her thesis, “A History of Debate at Butler University, 1857-1930.”