Revolutionary Classics (or, the classical origins of your Brown education)

When Brown University was founded in 1764 the curriculum was based on classical texts. In early America, the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity – read in the original Greek and Latin – were the foundation of a gentleman’s education. This course will explore early ideas and structures of higher learning in America from the springboard of those classical texts. We will read a sizable portion of Brown’s earliest curriculum (in English translation), but just as importantly we will seek to set that curriculum in the context of early American intellectual history, from roughly the Colonial to the Antebellum Period.