Mar 29, 2024  
2022 - 2023 Undergraduate Catalog 
    
2022 - 2023 Undergraduate Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

CLCV 357 - The Use and Abuse of Classics: Ethnicity in Antiquity and Race in the Modern US


Credits: (3)
College Curriculum: COLL 350
This course begins in the ancient Mediterranean world where some of the earliest inquiries about human difference took place. Prompted by colonial encounters, the Greeks began to examine human origins, genealogies, and environmental theories about why humans differed from one another in physical appearance and cultural expression. Through ethnographic and scientific inquiry, Greeks and Romans analyzed, marginalized, and categorized “others” while creating a privileged identity for themselves based on ideas of liberty, citizenship, and inclusion. Recovered during the Renaissance, these ancient intellectuals informed not only the explorers of the Age of Discovery but also the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Indeed, it was the confluence of interactions between Western Europeans and indigenous populations and the reemergence of ancient ideas of “otherness” that formed the basis of Enlightenment thought on such dichotomous subjects as liberty and racism, human rights and slavery, and secularism and religiosity. The course will conclude by examining the legacies of both the Greco-Roman tradition and the Enlightenment on the creators of the modern U.S., including Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton, among others, and the ramifications of these influences on contemporary U.S. society.