Twenty-five leading scholars examine the Declaration of Independence on its 250th anniversary.

On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress approved a document that would change the world. Drawing on natural rights, moral philosophy, natural and biblical theology, and classical virtue, the Declaration of Independence did not merely announce a political separation—it established the principles upon which a new republic would stand or fall.

As America marks the 250th anniversary of that founding act, The Civitas Collection 250 brings together 25 of the nation's leading scholars to examine the Declaration in depth. These essays resist the temptation to flatten the founding into a simple story. They probe what the Declaration meant in 1776, what it meant to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., and what it demands of us now—on questions of liberty and equality, self-government, executive power, religion, race, and the persistent effort to diminish what the founders established.

To read the Declaration as a whole is to discover not a relic but a living challenge. The Civitas Collection 250, featuring essays by scholars from leading universities and research institutions across the country, including from the newly established schools of civic thought, is essential reading for citizens, students, and scholars who take the American founding seriously.

An appreciative examination of the New England clambake, Neustadt divides her study into three parts: historical (social, economic, political, regional, and cultural) influences on the clambake; a close focus on the Allen's Neck clambake as a cultural phenomenon in its own right; and a critical examination of the central elements of the clambaking tradition—food, ritual, and festival. 

The author views the clambake as a unique American folk tradition with interesting connections and rich resonances with other aspects of American culture and history.

A compelling history of school desegregation and activism in San Francisco 

The picture of school desegregation in the United States is often painted with broad strokes of generalization and insulated anecdotes. Its true history, however, is remarkably wide ranging. Class Action tells the story of San Francisco’s long struggle over school desegregation in the wake of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. 

San Francisco’s story provides a critical chapter in the history of American school discrimination and the complicated racial politics that emerged. It was among the first large cities outside the South to face court-ordered desegregation following the Brown rulings, and it experienced the same demographic shifts that transformed other cities throughout the urban West. Rand Quinn argues that the district’s student assignment policies—including busing and other desegregative mechanisms—began as a remedy for state discrimination but transformed into a tool intended to create diversity. Drawing on extensive archival research—from court docket files to school district records—Quinn describes how this transformation was facilitated by the rise of school choice, persistent demand for neighborhood schools, evolving social and legal landscapes, and local community advocacy and activism.

Class Action is the first book to present a comprehensive political history of post-Brown school desegregation in San Francisco. Quinn illuminates the evolving relationship between jurisprudence and community-based activism and brings a deeper understanding to the multiracial politics of urban education reform. He responds to recent calls by scholars to address the connections between ideas and policy change and ultimately provides a fascinating look at race and educational opportunity, school choice, and neighborhood schools in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education.

Why does the American federal government seem to prioritize elite capitalist interests over those of other groups? Class Politics and the Creation of the American State draws on a wide range of sources—personal letters, official government documents, private notes, and newspaper articles—to reveal that the federal government was built to give the emerging capitalist elite a way to consolidate and institutionalize their power. Challenging both liberal and conservative interpretations about what the US Constitution means, this book tells a new story about how the American state took shape.

The framers of the Constitution constructed an image of the state, enshrined in the Constitution, that presented their power as universal: a system meant to serve all Americans equally. This image helped legitimize the new order, even if the rising capitalist class stood to benefit most of all. Since the United States of the late 1780s was not yet a fully capitalist society, the state that was built opened space for less capitalistically incorporated social classes, including some artisans and yeoman farmers, to have limited representation. Class Politics and the Creation of the American State shows how the structure of the early American state worked primarily to advance capitalist interests, while incorporating other groups enough to maintain a sense of broad representation and inclusion.

Postmodernism, multiculturalism, the alleged decline of the United States, deconstruction, leadership, and values—these topics have been at the forefront of contemporary intellectual and cultural debate and are likely to remain so for the near future. Participants in the debate can usefully enlarge the perspective to a comparison between the Greco-Roman world and contemporary society. In this thought-provoking work, a noted classics scholar tests the ancient-modern comparison, showing what it can add to the contemporary debates and what its limitations are.

Writing for intellectually adventurous readers, Galinsky explores Greece and Rome as multicultural societies, debates the merits of classicism in postmodern architecture, discusses the reign of Augustus in terms of modern leadership theories, and investigates the modern obsession with finding parallels between the supposed "decline and fall" of Rome and the "decay" of U.S. society.

Within these discussions, Galinsky shows the continuing vitality of the classical tradition in the contemporary world. The Greek and Roman civilizations have provided us not only with models for conscious adaptation but also points for radical departures. This ability to change and innovate from classical models is crucial, Galinsky maintains. It creates a reciprocal process whereby contemporary issues are projected into the past while aspects of the ancient world are redefined in terms of current approaches.

These essays result in a balanced assessment and stimulating restatement of some major issues in both contemporary U.S. society and the Greco-Roman world. The book, which speaks to a wide interdisciplinary audience, is based on a series of lectures that Galinsky gave as a national visiting scholar for Phi Beta Kappa. It concludes with a discussion of the role of classical studies in the United States today.

From the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, Mexican cinema became the most successful Latin American cinema and the leading Spanish-language film industry in the world. Many Cine de Oro (Golden Age cinema) films adhered to the dominant Hollywood model, but a small yet formidable filmmaking faction rejected Hollywood’s paradigm outright. Directors Fernando de Fuentes, Emilio Fernández, Luis Buñuel, Juan Bustillo Oro, Adolfo Best Maugard, and Julio Bracho sought to create a unique national cinema that, through the stories it told and the ways it told them, was wholly Mexican. The Classical Mexican Cinema traces the emergence and evolution of this Mexican cinematic aesthetic, a distinctive film form designed to express lo mexicano.

Charles Ramírez Berg begins by locating the classical style’s pre-cinematic roots in the work of popular Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada at the turn of the twentieth century. He also looks at the dawning of Mexican classicism in the poetics of Enrique Rosas’ El Automóvil Gris, the crowning achievement of Mexico’s silent filmmaking era and the film that set the stage for the Golden Age films. Berg then analyzes mature examples of classical Mexican filmmaking by the predominant Golden Age auteurs of three successive decades. Drawing on neoformalism and neoauteurism within a cultural studies framework, he brilliantly reveals how the poetics of Classical Mexican Cinema deviated from the formal norms of the Golden Age to express a uniquely Mexican sensibility thematically, stylistically, and ideologically.

Nashville has been many things: frontier town, Civil War battleground, New South mecca, and Music City, U.S.A. It is headquarters for several religious denominations, and also the home of some of the largest insurance, healthcare, and publishing concerns in the country. Located culturally as well as geographically between North and South, East and West, Nashville is centered in a web of often-competing contradictions.

One binding image of civic identity, however, has been consistent through all of Nashville's history: the classical Greek and Roman ideals of education, art, and community participation that early on led to the city's sobriquet, "Athens of the West," and eventually, with the settling of the territory beyond the Mississippi River, the "Athens of the South."

Illustrated with nearly a hundred archival and contemporary photographs, Classical Nashville shows how Nashville earned that appellation through its adoption of classical metaphors in several areas: its educational and literary history, from the first academies through the establishment of the Fugitive movement at Vanderbilt; the classicism of the city's public architecture, including its Capitol and legislative buildings; the evolution of neoclassicism in homes and private buildings; and the history and current state of the Parthenon, the ultimate symbol of classical Nashville, replete with the awe-inspiring 42-foot statue of Athena by sculptor Alan LeQuire.

Perhaps Nashville author John Egerton best captures the essence of this modern city with its solid roots in the past. He places Nashville "somewhere between the 'Athens of the West' and 'Music City, U.S.A.,' between the grime of a railroad town and the glitz of Opryland, between Robert Penn Warren and Robert Altman." Nashville's classical identifications have always been forward-looking, rather than antiquarian: ambitious, democratic, entrepreneurial, and culturally substantive. Classical Nashville celebrates the continuation of classical ideals in present-day Nashville, ideals that serve not as monuments to a lost past, but as sources of energy, creativity, and imagination for the future of a city.

Winner, PROSE Award, Classics, Association of American Publishers (AAP), 2018

Writing down the epic tales of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus in texts that became the Iliad and the Odyssey was a defining moment in the intellectual history of the West, a moment from which many current conventions and attitudes toward books can be traced. But how did texts originally written on papyrus in perhaps the eighth century BC survive across nearly three millennia, so that today people can read them electronically on a smartphone?

Classics from Papyrus to the Internet provides a fresh, authoritative overview of the transmission and reception of classical texts from antiquity to the present. The authors begin with a discussion of ancient literacy, book production, papyrology, epigraphy, and scholarship, and then examine how classical texts were transmitted from the medieval period through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the modern era. They also address the question of reception, looking at how succeeding generations responded to classical texts, preserving some but not others. This sheds light on the origins of numerous scholarly disciplines that continue to shape our understanding of the past, as well as the determined effort required to keep the literary tradition alive. As a resource for students and scholars in fields such as classics, medieval studies, comparative literature, paleography, papyrology, and Egyptology, Classics from Papyrus to the Internet presents and discusses the major reference works and online professional tools for studying literary transmission.

It was like a remake of The Cowboy and the Lady, except that this time they weren't friends. The 1990 Texas governor's race pitted Republican Clayton Williams, a politically conservative rancher and oil millionaire, against Democrat Ann Richards, an experienced progressive politician noted for her toughness and quick wit. Their differences offered voters a choice not only of policies and programs but also of stereotypes and myths of men's and women's proper roles.

Claytie and the Lady is the first in-depth look at how gender affected the 1990 governor's race. The authors' analysis reveals that Ann Richards' victory was a result of a unique combination of characteristics. She was simultaneously tough enough to convince voters that she could lead and feminine enough to put them at ease. At the same time, she remained committed to the progressive and women's issues that had won her the early support of feminists and progressives. The authors also show how Clayton Williams' appeal to the Texas cowboy myth backfired when he broke the cowboy code of chivalry to women.

The authors set their discussion within the historical context of twentieth-century Texas politics and the theoretical context of gender politics in order to pose a number of thought-provoking questions about the effects of women's participation in political life. Interviews with key players in the 1990 election, including Governor Ann Richards, add a lively and insightful counterpoint to the text.

Examines how Southern literary depictions of the natural world were influenced by the historical, social, and ecological changes of the 1930s and 1940s

Rieger studies the ways that nature is conceived of and portrayed by four prominent Southern writers of the era: Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner. Specifically, he argues that these writers created new versions of an old literary mode—the pastoral—in response to the destabilizing effects of the Great Depression, the rise of Southern modernism, and the mechanization of agricultural jobs.

Mass deforestation, soil erosion, urban development, and depleted soil fertility are issues that come to the fore in the works of these writers. In response, each author depicts a network model of nature, where humans are part of the natural world, rather than separate, over, or above it, as in the garden pastorals of the Old South, thus significantly revising the pastoral mode proffered by antebellum and Reconstruction-era writers.

Each writer, Rieger finds, infuses the pastoral mode with continuing relevance, creating new versions that fit his or her ideological positions on issues of race, class, and gender. Despite the ways these authors represent nature and humankind’s place in it, they all illustrate the idea that the natural environment is more than just a passive background against which the substance of life, or fiction, is played out.

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), champion of abstract expressionism and modernism—of Pollock, Miró, and Matisse—has been esteemed by many as the greatest art critic of the second half of the twentieth century, and possibly the greatest art critic of all time. This volume, a lively reassessment of Greenberg’s writings, features three approaches to the man and his work: Greenberg as critic, doctrinaire, and theorist. The book also features a transcription of a public debate with Greenberg that de Duve organized at the University of Ottawa in 1988. Clement Greenberg Between the Lines will be an indispensable resource for students, scholars, and enthusiasts of modern art.

“In this compelling study, Thierry de Duve reads Greenberg against the grain of the famous critic’s critics—and sometimes against the grain of the critic himself. By reinterpreting Greenberg’s interpretations of Pollock, Duchamp, and other canonical figures, de Duve establishes new theoretical coordinates by which to understand the uneasy complexities and importance of Greenberg’s practice.”  John O’Brian, editor of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms

“De Duve is an expert on theoretical aesthetics and thus well suited to reassess the formalist tenets of the late American art critic's theory on art and culture. . . . De Duve's close readings of Greenberg . . . contain much of interest, and the author clearly enjoys matching wits with ‘the world's best known art critic.’”   Library Journal

During the 1920s and ’30s, Franz Taibosh—whose stage name was Clicko—performed in front of millions as one of the stars of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Prior to his fame in the United States, Taibosh toured the world as the “Wild Dancing Bushman,” showing off his frenzied dance moves in freak shows, sideshows, and music halls from Australia to Cuba. When he died in 1940, the New York Times called him “the only African bushman ever exhibited in this country.” In Clicko, Neil Parsons unearths the untold story of Taibosh’s journey from boyhood on a small farm in South Africa to top billing as one of the travelling World’s Fair Freaks.

Through Taibosh’s tale, Parsons brings to life the bizarre golden age of entertainment as well as the role that the dubious new science of race played in it. Beginning with Taibosh’s early life, Clicko untangles the real story of his ancestry from the web of myths spun around him on his rise to international stardom. Parsons then chronicles the unhappy middle period of Taibosh’s career, when he suffered under the heel of a vicious manager. Left to freeze and nearly starve in an unheated apartment, Taibosh was rescued by Frank Cook, Barnum & Bailey’s lawyer. The Cooks adopted Taibosh as a member of their family of circus managers and performers, and his happy—if far from average—years with them make up the final chapter of this remarkable story.

Equal parts entertaining and disturbing, Clicko vividly evokes a forgotten era when vaudeville drew massive crowds and circus freaks were featured in Billboard and Variety. Parsons introduces us to colorful characters such as George Auger the giant and the original Zip the Pinhead, but above all, he gives us an unforgettable portrait of Franz Taibosh, rescued at last from the racists and the romantics and revealed here as an ordinary man with an extraordinary life.