| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910. By Caroline Winterer. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xii, 244 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-6799-1.)
This book provides the first full and sympathetic account of the changing role of classical education in pre–World War I America, as viewed and understood by scholars and teachers. The story told is, on the whole, one of gradual if heroically resisted extinction.	1
The colonials had studied "heathen wisdom" (p. 15) as a subordinate handmaiden (often sharply suspected for her corrupting influence) to a religious education centered on the Bible and aimed above all at forming clergymen. In the drama of the revolutionary founding, Americans looked for inspiration to senatorial republican Rome with its agrarian civic virtue and eloquent oratory, while they held up the strife-ridden Greek democracies as important cautionary lessons. Yet in the classrooms of the new nation the focus was on Latin and Greek grammar, usually to the exclusion of almost all else. Teachers spoke with enthusiasm of the high moral value of immersion in the classic texts, but their recorded pedagogy, and the reports we have from their students, convey a picture of grim stultification.	. . .

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