TY - JOUR AU1 - Butler, Leslie. AB - b o o k rev i ews The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States. By Carl J. Richard. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 272. Cloth, $49.00.) While serious historians writing in the 1960s could dismiss early Americans' Greek and Latin references as little more than "window dressing," subsequent work has overturned that glib assessment and presented an increasingly nuanced picture of America's obsession with the classics. Carl Richard's earlier book The Founders and the Classics (1994) builds on the pioneering work of Meyer Reinhold's Classica Americana (1984) to document just how steeped the revolutionary generation was in the history, political thought, and mythology of Greece and Rome. More recently, two volumes by Caroline Winterer--The Culture of Classicism (2002), on colleges, and The Mirror of Antiquity (2007), on women in the early republic--demonstrate the impressive adaptability, persistence, and social reach of the classical tradition in America. Richard's second monograph continues this scholarly project by reassessing the antebellum decades. Richard's title encapsulates his argument by directly challenging Reinhold's assertion that the period between 1760 and 1790 was "the golden age of the classical tradition in America," when the classics were, TI - The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States by Carl J. Richard (review) JF - The Journal of the Civil War Era DA - 2013-02-13 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/university-of-north-carolina-press/the-golden-age-of-the-classics-in-america-greece-rome-and-the-0Wl0gCRKpO SP - 125 EP - 127 VL - 3 IS - 1 DP - DeepDyve ER -