The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910

by Caroline Winterer

Winner of the New Scholars Book Award from the American Educational Research Association Debates continue to rage over whether American university students should be required to master a common core of knowledge. In The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 , Caroline Winterer traces the emergence of the classical model that became standard in the American curriculum in the nineteenth century and now lies at the core of contemporary controversies. By closely examining university curricula and the writings of classical scholars, Winterer demonstrates how classics was transformed from a narrow, language-based subject to a broader study of civilization, persuasively arguing that we cannot understand both the rise of the American university and modern notions of selfhood and knowledge without an appreciation for the role of classicism in their creation.

Genres: History, American History, Philosophy, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published December 11, 2001

Reviews

[Madeleine Grabarczyk · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Opposition to interlining, translations, and the decline in making verse - to all shortcuts - stemmed from the fear that if the leaders of the nation were classically ignorant, they would become morally rudderless."

While I appreciated how Winterer undulates time and theme in this very informative and orienting monograph, I felt that towards the middle, edits might've been made to facilitate the transition from her examination of antebellum attitudes towards classicism to the final stretch of the work that focused on attitudes towards classicism in the university setting from 1870-1910. In that middle section, it all rather blended together and felt a bit of a slog. Further examination of classicism's influence on attitudes about the war would've been appreciated. Lending more depth to the evidence presented might've been preferable to its volume. Overall, Winterer explicates fascinating patterns of American attitudes towards classicism and does an excellent job illuminating just how entrenched is the history of American academia with such metamorphosing sentiments around civic duty, elitism, morality, individuality, and history.

[Drianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

...Or, the decline and fall of Classics in American education and life. Sigh.

Winterer traces the changes in the role of Classics from the immediate post-Revolutionary period, when Rome and its republic played such a key role in the development of the new Republic, to the beginning of the 20th century, when Classics, not only no longer a requirement in higher education, was rather not even a central subject.

In the early days of the US, Classics *was* education. Learning the ancient languages (with maybe a smattering of culture facts haphazardly tested) was what constituted all education, the purpose of which was to produce gentlemen (all men, obviously) who could take public roles in the new nation: ministers, politicians, etc. Winterer discusses how the original pedagogical methods (basically, memorization of set passages to recite and construe) never achieved the goal of those using them, namely using the content itself to produce cultivated gentlemen. (The students were too busy loathing the languages and not actually being very good at them, plus ça change and all that.)

In the first half of the 19th c., Winterer contends that education broadened slightly, and Americans' focus shifted (somewhat) from Rome to Greece as the Classical culture par excellence. Teaching methods shifted away from the traditional grammar-grammar-grammar approach to one that began to look at the entire culture (and, in fact, invented the idea of 'culture', which was not a term prior to the 19th c.).

But as colleges multiplied, a huge number of changes happened after the Civil War. The university the way we know it today in American took shape: no Greek and finally no Latin entrance exams, elective programs instead of all prescribed (Classical language) courses, departments specializing in different subjects, and finally the creation of graduate schools to produce a PhD-holding professorate. Many of these changes can be traced to the influence that German universities had on US Classicists in this period; many went abroad to German universities to obtain the PhD, and they absorbed the 'scientific' model of the new Altertumswissenschaft there, which they brought home. But the irony that Winterer brings out is that the more American Classicists, using the new German-influenced methods, began to teach more accurately about the ancient world than they had in the previous century, when everyone had just sort of generally assumed that the Greeks and Romans were just like 'us'; but by showing all the ways in which the Greek were not 'us', they destroyed the very relevance of antiquity which had always kept Classics as the subject of education.

The book was very interesting, if disheartening to me (as a Classicist). So many of the same arguments we keep going round and round: Classics are the center of 'Western Civilization'! Classical texts have a unique perspective to offer! Classics is the province of the elite!

The most depressing statistic in the book: of the 1 million BAs granted in the US in 1994, only 600 were in Classics. ō tempora! ō mōrēs!

I would've liked to have seem more engagement with the idea that Winterer is always, but generally implicitly, only discussing white men. She has a couple of paragraphs about women's relationship to Classics and higher education, but almost nothing about any people of color, a glaring omission.

Overall, deserves the recognition it has gotten as the best look at Classics in education in the long 19th c.

[rr]

To be honest, I haven't read the whole thing. I've read the first half, which is the part that is relevant to my summer project. And I was excited to dig into this book because it came to me highly recommended. As a result, maybe my expectations were a little too high. There is definitely useful and interesting stuff here. I appreciate Winterer's sketch of American worries about the traditional (solely grammar-based) study of Classics and her demonstration of how a more culture-oriented approach developed in the first half of the 19th century. Winterer also shows that a shift in focus--from Rome to Greece--occurred at the same time (though perhaps she understates the degree to which the Romans were never entirely displaced). What surprised me was the amount of repetition from chapter to chapter in a relatively modest volume. And I wasn't always sure that she was presenting the most convincing evidence or that she was reading a particular piece of evidence in what seemed to me to be the most obvious way. But ultimately what strikes me as odd and disappointing is the lack of enthusiasm Winterer seems to have for Classics and the history of Classics. There seems to me to be missing a spark of her own interest which would make all her careful research come together and breathe.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

The contention is that classicism in America (1780-1910)moved from the centrality of ancient languages and grammar, to ancient culture. And from Rome to Greece.

"During the antbellum era, classical scholars and other educated Americans turned from the love of Rome and a focus on classical grammar to a new focus on ancient Greece and the totality of society, art and literature. This shift from Rome to Greece and from words to worlds was at the most basic level a pivotal tranformation in the American college curriculum. For the first time a recognizably modern canon - with new texts of old authors and a new way of reading them - appeared in higher education, gradually changing the old college of mental discipline into the post-Civil war college of liberal culture..." (4)

[Julie Pearson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a solid and well researched book. The scope of the book is focused on university classicists, which is a more narrow field than the title might suggest.

To be fair-- I had to read this book as an assignment, which may have negatively impacted my enjoyment of it.

One detail I found a tad concerning is that that author occasionally sites sources within sources, rather than tracking down the original source herself.

[Allison · Rating 2 out of 5]

Caroline Winterer explores the fascinating history of the role of the Greek and Roman classics in American history, specifically in academics. While this is probably a book for the focused researcher rather than a curious interloper, it definitely makes some interesting points and traces a detailed history of the classics in education.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important history of how Classicism shaped early American intellectual life (but a bit dry in parts, to be honest).