The Great Courses – What America’s Founders Learned from Antiquity 2024-7

Published on: 2024-08-24 22:18:50

Categories: 28

Descriptions

What America’s Founders Learned from Antiquity, The founding of the United States was a daring and revolutionary political experiment. In a radical break from the historical past, American colonists threw off the yoke of monarchy and aristocracy to declare a completely new form of government. In creating this new regime, the founders took inspiration from the political systems of ancient Rome and Greece. But what exactly were these influences? And how deep did they go? What were the founders’ sources, and what precisely did they take from them? And did the founders’ interface with the ancient world shape the new nation in far-reaching ways? To grapple with these questions is to uncover a complex and revealing story—One that sheds a profound light on the political, philosophical, and human issues that surrounded the American conflict with Britain, and which blazed a new system of government that would change the world.

this course reveals the influences of the ancient world on the American founders. In 24 lectures, taught by Professor Caroline Winterer of Stanford University, you’ll explore the thought and actions of the American revolutionaries to see how classical antiquity shaped every aspect of the revolutionary and founding era. You’ll better understand why it was natural for American revolutionary thinkers to turn to classicism to make sense of their growing disunity with the British, and to envision and forge a new kind of government.As the course unfolds, you’ll look in detail at the thinking of many of the iconic figures in the story, such as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine, and how the influences of classicism were different for each founder. And you’ll note that the lessons they took from ancient thinkers bore both on what to do to create a viable and stable republic and equally on what not to do.

What you’ll learn

Explore the ethos of classicism that deeply imbued the world of the founders, as Americans of the Colonial era surrounded themselves with the Greek and Roman classical world, which, in John Adams’s words, offered “models to all mankind” for education, beauty, art, architecture, and politics. Following the Revolution, see how the architecture and design of Neoclassicism became an expression of the republican ideals of the new nation.
Discover that, for founding-era thinkers, Roman and Greek political philosophy became a framework for understanding their own turbulent times. In the wake of oppressive British taxation, track the ways in which Roman history served as a guide, as revolutionaries identified with the virtues of the Roman republic of farmers, viewing the British as a monarchical empire veering into tyranny, as had the Roman empire.