The Culture of Classicism

By Caroline Winterer,

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

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Culture of Classicism as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Winterer provides the classic discussion of the place of Rome (and then Greece) in early American education and intellectual life. The book is about how American classicists sought to shape a relationship to the classical past that persists to this day, creating a canon of ancient texts as a reaction against and refuge from modernity. The real payoff of this book for me lies in showing how the past is never just the past but a continuing aspect of our own identity-formation.

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Book cover of The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America's Modern Penal System, 1829-1913

The Deviant Prison By Ashley Rubin,

What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?

The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…

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