The Contested Classics: Education in Early North America, 1630-1830
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Peterson, Mark
Abstract
This dissertation historicizes many doomsday narratives about a liberal arts education that dominate popular and scholarly accounts alike. Today, talk of a “crisis” in the humanities is everywhere – on television, in newspapers, and even in our departmental meetings. All too often, we cast this calamity as a new phenomenon, a product of an alleged “modern” disenchantment with supposedly antiquated and ineffectual humanistic modes of knowledge production. What follows is one of the first attempts to shed light on this epistemic anxiety by examining the vibrant discourse surrounding a key component of the liberal arts, namely classical education, in early America. I chart how the practices, ideologies, and recipients of Latin and Greek learning engendered heated social, cultural, and intellectual debates long before the rise of “modern” bogeymen like industrialization, secularization, and bureaucratization. This is an account that, in tune with recent research in the history of the humanities and scholarly practices, pays particular attention to the transatlantic story of classical education and the messy manuscript and print world of the classroom. Each chapter digs into troves of unexamined student and teacher manuscripts (in Latin, Greek, and English), and pays attention to the fine-grained practices of education. In doing so, this dissertation reframes the narrative of classical learning in early America, dispelling tired myths about antiquity’s uncontested place in the colonial past that have animated both old-school elites and contemporary critics. From the inception of schools in New England in the 1630s, Latin and Greek instruction stood out as a hotly contested and fiercely debated course of study. Even as these branches of the humanities occupied so much time in the classroom and space in the mind, this knowledge still had to be negotiated, probed for its value, investigated for its efficacy, and, sometimes, scolded for its failures. Educators always had to justify the humdrum, time-consuming realities of Latin and Greek learning, often by grafting it onto larger cultural goals that were themselves never beyond reproach or reevaluation. Whether it was drawing pious messages from non-Christian sources, honing habits of eloquence, projecting conversion and civilization onto Native Americans, or wrestling with how American intellect stacked up against ancient and modern predecessors, the classical classroom in early North America was far livelier than we have been led to believe.
Recommended Citation
Delwiche, Theodore Richard, "The Contested Classics: Education in Early North America, 1630-1830" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1500.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1500
