Abstract
On 28 August 2008 Senator Barack Obama delivered his acceptance speech as Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States. At that convention, three months before his election as the first African-American president of his country, Obama addressed his party in the stadium of the Denver Broncos. He stood in front of a newly minted classical facade, part temple, part theatre with a portico and a double rank of columns. Obama risked ridicule. As Simon Schama wrote of the event, ‘Architrave alert! Fluted columns! Cecil B. DeMille Doric! What a gift to satirists who could lampoon Obama as a wannabe Demosthenes, so self-monumentalised that he seemed to be presumptuously rehearsing the inaugural oath on the Capitol steps.’1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Richard M. Gummere, The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1963); Meyer Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit, 1984); Wolfgang Haase and Meyer Reinhold (eds), The Classical Tradition and the Americas, vol. 1 (Berlin and New York, 1994); and notably, John W. Eadie (ed.), Classical Tradition in Early America (Ann Arbor, MI, 1976); Susan Ford Wiltshire (ed.), The Usefulness of Classical Learning in the Eighteenth Century (University Park, PA, 1976); Susan Ford Wiltshire (ed.), The Classical Tradition in the South, special issue of Southern Humanities Review (Fall, 1977); Roger G. Kennedy, Greek Revival America (New York, 1981); Wendy A. Cooper, Classical Taste in America 1800–1840 (New York, London and Paris, 1993).
Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore, MD and London, 2002): 1.
Susan Ford Wiltshire, Greece, Rome and the Bill of Rights (Norman, OK and London, 1992); Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1994).
Both are considered in Ward Briggs, ‘United States’, in Craig W. Kallendorf (ed.), A Companion to the Classical Tradition (Oxford, 2007): 282; Dickinson (as ‘Fabius’) was a later enthusiastic quoter of Polybius, Richard, Founders and the Classics, 111.
Françoise Waquet, Le Latin ou l’empire d’un signe XVIe–XXe siècle (Paris, 1999).
James Raven, ‘The Importation of Books to Colonial North America’, Publishing History 42 (1997): 21–49; James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811 (Columbia, SC, 2002); James Raven, ‘Commodification and Value: Interaction in Book Traffic to North America, c. 1750–1820’, in Bill Bell, Philip Bennett, and Jonquil Bevan (eds), Across Boundaries: The Book in Culture and Commerce (Winchester and New Castle, DE, 2000): 73–90; James Raven. ‘The Export of Books from London’, in Hugh Amory and David Hall (eds), The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World: The History of the Book in North America, vol. 1 (New York, 1999): 183–98; James Raven, ‘Social Libraries and Library Societies in Eighteenth-Century North America’, in Kenneth E. Carpenter and Thomas A. Augst (eds), Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States (Boston, MA, 2007): 24–52.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983, reprinted London 1991): 40, 41.
Andrew Laird, The Epic of America: An Introduction to Rafael Landivar and the ‘Rusticatio Mexicana (London, 2006): 9; the priest, Aguilar, had survived alongside one other Spaniard, Andrew Laird, ‘Latin in Cuauhtémoc’s Shadow: Humanism and the Politics of Language in Mexico after the Conquest’, in Yasmin Haskell and Juanita Feros Ruys (eds), Latinity and Alterity in the Early Modern World (Tempe, AZ, 2010): 169–99;I am most grateful to Andrew Laird for his suggestions for the further reading that informs this chapter.
See James Raven, ‘Sent to the Wilderness: Mission Literature in Colonial America’, in James Raven (ed.), Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing since 1700 (London and Vermont, 2000): 135–61 (135–9).
See David Lupher, Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Ann Arbor, MI, 2003).
Andrew Laird, ‘Renaissance Emblems and Aztec Glyphs: Italian Humanism and Mexico (I): 1520–1590’, Studi Umanistici Piceni: Atti dei Congressi 26 (2006): 227–39; and ‘Pagan Symbols and Christian Images: Italian Humanism and Mexico (II): 1590–1750’, Studi Umanistici Piceni: Atti dei Congressi 28 (2008): 167–81.
Nathaniel Hodges and John Quincy (eds), Loimologia: or, an Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1885 (London, 1720).
Marina Frasca-Spada, ‘Compendious footnotes’, in Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (eds), Books and the Sciences in History (Cambridge, 2000): 173–89.
John Eliot’s, Mamusee Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblium God (Cambridge, MA, 1663), a Bible in Algonquian, was begun sometime between 1650 and 1658 and was later accompanied by The Indian Grammar of 1666.
The quoted text is a translation from Spanish. ‘Un humanismo humano, vital, vivo e itegral, que eleva al primer plano in consideración de la persona humana’, Gabriel Méndez Plancarte, Humanismo Mexicano del Siglo XVI: Introducción, selección y versions (Mexico City, 1946): xi.
Fabio Troncarelli, ‘The Man Behind the Mask of Zorro: William Lamport of Wexford’, History Ireland 9 (2001): 22–5; Gabriel Méndez Plancarte, ‘Don Guillén de Lámport y su Regio Salterio, Manuscrito de 1655: estudios, selección, versión y notas’, Abside 12 (1948): 2–3.
See Susan Ford Wiltshire (ed.), The Usefulness of Classical Learning in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, PA, 1976).
Among notable British examples, Cesar Picton (c. 1755–1836), a slave from Gorée Island, Senegal, died at Kingston upon Thames, a successful businessman; Caesar Shaw, freed slave and servant, features in two eighteenth-century portraits in the Spencers’ Althorp House, Northamptonshire; Scipio Kennedy, freed slave, served at Culzean Castle, Ayrshire; cf. Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1978). For Caribbean references I am grateful to Matthias Röhrig Assunção.
Jacques de Cauna, Au temps des isles à sucre: Histoire d’une plantation de Saint-Dominigue au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2003): 92.
Notably, Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years (New York, 1952); and see Briggs, ‘United States’, 282–8.
Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution: Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1992): 23–6 (26).
Cited in David S Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1997), 215.
Notably, Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1757 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1969): 23–6; see also Richard, Founders and the Classics, arguing that a classical canon was so restrictively influential that it inhibited the founders’ critical instincts (10).
Edwin Wolf II, Book Culture of a Colonial American City: Philadelphia Books, Bookmen, and Booksellers (Oxford, 1988): 90.
Robert B. Winans, A Descriptive Checklist of Book Catalogues Separately Printed in America 1693–1500 (Worcester, MA, 1981).
A Catalogue of the Library of Yale-College in New-Haven (New London, CT, 1743).
A Catalogue of Books in the Library of the College of New Jersey, January 29, 1760, reprinted edn (Princeton, NJ, 1949).
Walter B. Edgar, ‘The Libraries of Colonial South Carolina’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1969): 32.
H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 1965): 199–232.
Kevin J. Hayes, The Library of William Byrd of Westover (Madison, WI, 1997): 5.
Ibid., 6.
See Ibid., 25–35.
Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling (eds), The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover 1709–1712 (Richmond, VA, 1941): 104–5.
James Raven, ‘From Promotion to Prescription: Arrangements for Reading and Eighteenth-Century Libraries’, in James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Readingin England (Cambridge, 1996): 175–201; James Raven, ‘The Representation of Philanthropy and Reading in the Eighteenth-Century Library’, Libraries and Culture 31, 2 (Spring 1996): 492–510.
Reproduced and discussed in James Raven, ‘I viaggi dei libri: realtà e raffigurazioni’, in Maria Gioia Tavoni and Françoise Waquet (eds), Gli spazi del libro nell’Europa del XVIII secolo (Bologna, 1997): 47–86; and Raven, ‘Representation of Philanthropy and Reading in the Eighteenth-Century Library’.
Reproduced in Rollo G. Silver, The American Printer, 1757–1525 (Charlottesville, VA, 1967), plate XV; I am grateful to James Green for this reference.
P[ierce] Tempest, Iconologia: Or, Moral Emblems, by Caesar Ripa (London, 1709): i.
Memo of letter from Eliza Pinckney to her father, Jan 1741–42, and letter to Mary Bartlett (1742) in Elise Pinckney (ed.), The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney 1739–1762 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1972): 24, 35–7.
T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1985).
See Meyer Reinhold, ‘Opponents of Classical Learning during the Revolutionary Period’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112 (1968): 221–34.
Edgar C. Reinke, ‘A Classical Debate of the Charleston, South Carolina, Library Society,’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 61 (1967): 83–99.
Philip M. Hamer (ed.), The Papers of Henry Laurens, 13 vols, vol. 8 (Columbia, SC, 1968-): 141, Laurens to John Rose, 28 Dec 1771.
Clive Griffin, The Crombergers of Seville: The History of a Printing and Merchant Dynasty (Oxford, 1988): 56–7, 63–97, 146, table IV.
Some indication of the range of imports can be gleaned from J. Yhmoff Cabrera, Catálogo de Los Impresos Europeos del Siglo XVI que Custodia la Biblioteca Nacional de Mexico, 3 vols (Mexico City, 1996).
Stuart Gillespie, ‘The Developing Corpus of Literary Translation’, in Peter France and Stuart Gillespie (eds), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English vol. 3 1660–1790 (Oxford, 2005): 123–46 (143–4;cf. also figs. 1 and 2, pp. 133, 134).
Henri-Jean Martin, The French Book (Baltimore, MD, 1996): 25–7.
William Brattle, Compendium logicae secundum principia D. Renati Cartesii plerumque efformatum, et catechistice propositum (Boston, MA, 1735).
Nicolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf, Ludovici a Thurenstein in antiqvissima fratrum ecclesia … (Philadelphia, PA, 1742).
William Brown, Pharmacopoeia simpliciorum & efficaciorum, in usum nosocomii militaris (Philadelphia, PA, 1781).
Edwin Wolf, revised edn by John C. Van Horne and James Green, ‘At the Instance of Benjamin Franklin’: A Brief History of the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA, 1995), with illustration, 9.
Stuart C. Sherman, ‘The Library Company of Baltimore, 1795–1854’, Maryland Historical Magazine 39 (1944): 6–24 (9).
David Money, The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Tradition of British Latin Verse (London and Oxford, 1998): ch. 4.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2011 James Raven
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Raven, J. (2011). Classical Transports: Latin and Greek Texts in North and Central America before 1800. In: Howsam, L., Raven, J. (eds) Books between Europe and the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305090_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305090_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33074-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-30509-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)