Greece, Rome, and The American Experience (Hist 4325): Selecting a Topic

Art & Architecture:

• How did Roman architecture influence the design of American public buildings?
• How did Roman architecture or the imagined idea of Roman architecture influence American domestic architecture and gardens?
• Did Roman portraiture have any influence on American portrait painting?
• Did American landscape painting incorporate classical elements?
• Did women's fashions and hairstyles imitate classical forms or imagined classical forms, and if so, did those elements from from knowledge of Rome or from European classicizing styles?

Rhetoric

• Which Roman authors were cited or quoted regularly in public writing? (Select a year or a topic and read newspaper articles and other writings on it. List and analyze the classical authors quoted or referred to).
• In public writings, was the influence of Roman writers the same in the northern and southern colonies? (Select a year or a topic and read newspaper articles and other writings on it. List and analyze the classical authors quoted or referred to and compare articles from the North and South.)
• Travel writing:
  • Select one writer who wrote more than one book about his/her travels in Italy. Analyze and compare the treatment of classical themes.
  • Select two or three writers who wrote books or articles about Rome [or another specific place]. Analyze and compare their treatment of places and classical themes.
• Edward Gibbon:
  • Select a particular place or theme in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Analyze it in detail, incorporating ancient writers and monuments into the analysis.
  • Investigate the influence of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on American writers.
• Cicero: Read a selection of Cicero's works and a selection of American political writings. How did Cicero influence American ideas?

Politics

• Trace the influence of Roman political writing on one or more American political documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, state constitutions, etc.)
• Trace the influence of Roman political forms on the development of the Congress and electoral laws.
• Select a political leader and examine the influence of Roman political thinking on him (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are the most obvious, but there are many possibilities.)
• Was there any classical influence in regard to citizenship, race, or ethnicity in the American colonies or states?
• Did American relations with American Indians owe any ideas to Roman relations with conquered peoples or barbarians?

Agriculture

• Did agricultural manuals in the early American colonies or states owe any debt to Roman agricultural writers such as Cato the Elder?
• Did American attitudes to the value and status of farming as an occupation owe anything to Roman attitudes?

Education

• What was the influence of Roman educational ideals on the development of the American education system?
  • Who should be educated?
  • What subjects were necessary for a leader (or a worker, or a woman) to study?
  • Why were the classics valued and what made them fall from popularity?