Archive for January, 2008
Tell Them We Are Rising 2: The Great Debaters
Continuing the theme from the previous post, read this Salon review of “The Great Debaters”, one of the characters of which is an African-American professor of classics and theology. Here’s an excerpt: About midway through Denzel Washington’s new film “The Great Debaters” comes a raw and terrifying scene that exemplifies why the movie’s worth seeing, […]
Tell Them We Are Rising’: African Americans and the Classics
For some really interesting reading on the social, educational, and political role of Classics in recent African-American history, read Kenneth W. Goings and Eugene O’Connor, “‘Tell Them We Are Rising’: African Americans and the Classics” (starts on p. 6) in this issue of Amphora (the newsletter for the American Philological Association). From the time of […]
Latin–Not Just For Toffs and Fotherington-Thomases
Read more about the growing appreciation and revival of Latin here: Latin, it was reported last week, is making a comeback in inner-city schools in London: 20 primaries are trying Latin lessons, under the aegis of Project Iris, run by teacher Lorna Robinson. Something similar is happening in Oxfordshire, where the language is also being […]
Meet Hadrian…
from an article on a new exhibition: After being made emperor AD117, he inherited a Roman Empire in its prime, which had thrived on a policy of endless expansion and conquest. His first move, within hours of coronation, was to withdraw his troops from Mesopotamia, now Iraq, and fortify the empire’s boundaries by building his […]