| Classical scholars in nineteenth-century America formed a powerful and vocal group of pedagogical reformers who helped to revolutionize American higher education. Since the seventeenth century, the classics had formed the backbone of the American college curriculum, but they were taught as grueling exercises in memorization and repetition. Around 1830, a revolution began in the teaching of the ancients. Classical scholars began to teach not just Greek and Latin grammar, but classical literature. They helped their students to position a text in a historical, literary, and artistic context, extending the students' grasp of the ancient world and deploying a set of ancient works never before used in the American college classroom. Their goal was not memorization or political didacticism but cultivation: intellectual and spiritual elevation through immersion in classical literature. This new pedagogical method spread after the mid-nineteenth century to other emerging disciplines within the college, such as modern literature and art history. From these new methods emerged the new humanities, a group of disciplines united by the philological method and the cultural ideal. Classical scholars overhauled a major portion of the undergraduate curriculum by making cultivation a central goal.;Classicists also articulated a compelling ideal of knowledge for graduate education. They were among the first scholars to bring advanced study to American shores in the form of German classical philology, which then led the world in sophistication. At Harvard, Yale, and the University of Michigan, important sites in the rise of the modern university, these scholars led efforts to inaugurate postcollegiate study in America. Their ideal of erudition, however, differed from the highly specialized study traditionally emphasized in histories of higher education. Classicists encouraged advanced study, but only as the fruit of an education rooted in broad, integrative knowledge. Over the course of the century, these scholars embodied this model of erudition in some of the earliest graduate programs in America. These programs prized advanced study but discouraged narrow specialization and promoted expertise while encouraging a broad grasp of knowledge. The dissertation argues that this ideal of erudition formed a powerful current in the transformation of Victorian American intellectual life. |
