The Battle of the Classics
The Battle of the Classics

Author: Eric Adler

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-09-04

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0197518796

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These are troubling days for the humanities. In response, a recent proliferation of works defending the humanities has emerged. But, taken together, what are these works really saying, and how persuasive do they prove? The Battle of the Classics demonstrates the crucial downsides of contemporary apologetics for the humanities and presents in its place a historically informed case for a different approach to rescuing the humanistic disciplines in higher education. It reopens the passionate debates about the classics that took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America as a springboard for crafting a novel foundation for the humanistic tradition. Eric Adler demonstrates that current defenses of the humanities rely on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of certain poorly defined skills such as "critical thinking." It criticizes this conventional approach, contending that humanists cannot hope to save their disciplines without arguing in favor of particular humanities content. As the uninspired defenses of the classical humanities in the late nineteenth century prove, instrumental apologetics are bound to fail. All the same, the book shows that proponents of the Great Books favor a curriculum that is too intellectually narrow for the twenty-first century. The Battle of the Classics thus lays out a substance-based approach to undergraduate education that will revive the humanities, even as it steers clear of overreliance on the Western canon. The book envisions a global humanities based on the examination of masterworks from manifold cultures as the heart of an intellectually and morally sound education.

The Culture of Classicism
The Culture of Classicism

Author: Caroline Winterer

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2004-04-09

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780801878893

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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.

The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II
The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II

Author: David A. Hollinger

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2006-04-14

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 0801889421

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The role played by the humanities in reconciling American diversity—a diversity of both ideas and peoples—is not always appreciated. This volume of essays, commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, examines that role in the half century after World War II, when exceptional prosperity and population growth, coupled with America's expanded political interaction with the world abroad, presented American higher education with unprecedented challenges and opportunities. The humanities proved to be the site for important efforts to incorporate groups and doctrines that had once been excluded from the American cultural conversation. Edited and introduced by David Hollinger, this volume explores the interaction between the humanities and demographic changes in the university, including the link between external changes and the rise of new academic specializations in area and other interdisciplinary studies. This volume analyzes the evolution of humanities disciplines and institutions, examines the conditions and intellectual climate in which they operate, and assesses the role and value of the humanities in society. Contents: John Guillory, "Who's Afraid of Marcel Proust? The Failure of General Education in the American University" Roger L. Geiger, "Demography and Curriculum: The Humanities in American Higher Education from the 1950s through the 1980s" Joan Shelley Rubin, "The Scholar and the World: Academic Humanists and General Readers" Martin Jay, "The Ambivalent Virtues of Mendacity: How Europeans Taught (Some of Us) to Learn to Love the Lies of Politics" James T. Kloppenberg, "The Place of Value in a Culture of Facts: Truth and Historicism" Bruce Kuklick, "Philosophy and Inclusion in the United States, 1929–2001" John T. McGreevy, "Catholics, Catholicism, and the Humanities, 1945–1985" Jonathan Scott Holloway, "The Black Scholar, the Humanities, and the Politics of Racial Knowledge Since 1945" Rosalind Rosenberg, "Women in the Humanities: Taking Their Place" Leila Zenderland, "American Studies and the Expansion of the Humanities" David C. Engerman, "The Ironies of the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and the Rise of Russian Studies" Andrew E. Barshay, "What is Japan to Us"? Rolena Adorno, "Havana and Macondo: The Humanities Side of U.S. Latin American Studies, 1940–2000"

The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age, 1867–1893
The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age, 1867–1893

Author: Leanne M. Zalewski

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1501358316

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This transatlantic study analyses a missing chapter in the history of art collecting, the first art market bubble in the United States. In the decades following the Civil War, French art monopolized art collections across the United States. During this “Gilded Age picture rush,” the commercial art system-art dealers, galleries, auction houses, exhibitions, museums, art journals, press coverage, art histories, and collection catalogues-established a strong foothold it has not relinquished to this day. In addition, a pervasive concern for improving aesthetics and providing the best contemporary art to educate the masses led to the formation not only of private art collections, but also of institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to the publication of art histories. Richly informed by collectors' and art dealers' diaries, letters, stock books, journals, and hitherto neglected art histories, The New York Market for French Art in the Gilded Age, 1867-1893 offers a fresh perspective on this trailblazing era.