Perspectives

On Americans’ embrace of the ancient Mediterranean.

How the first professional African American writer used Homer’s Iliad to tell a new story of the Old South, revealing connections to the most popular American poet of the century.

Rome’s enduring visual allure comes to cinematic life, and the city is transformed yet again in the process.

Famed banker J.P. Morgan was an avid collector of antiquities and other rare, beautiful, or high-quality objects.

America’s Founding Fathers sought to evoke ancient Greece and Rome in the urban layout, federal architecture, monumental statues, and painted interiors of Washington, DC.

An analysis of Frederick Douglass and Edmonia Lewis demonstrate the importance of studying Black classicism.

Commemorative practices play an essential role in the human desire to remember and to be remembered, but they rarely vanquish the human capacity to forget.

Two engravings from the sixteenth century offer an opportunity to reflect on the teaching of Greek myths in the twenty-first century.

How laws regulating the collection of antiquities have evolved over the past couple of centuries.

In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, slave owners often renamed the people they enslaved with classical names such as Venus, Scipio, and Caesar.

Bowdoin’s nineteenth-century educators used many classically-themed paintings from James Bowdoin III’s collection to teach high moral values, while selling off others judged to be sexually suggestive, and, thus, unfit for young viewers.

A reexamination of Drayton Hall plantation reveals the enduring influence of classical antiquity on the names and spaces of American enslavement.

James Bowdoin III, founder of Bowdoin University, greatly valued all things ancient Mediterranean.

An early Bowdoin patron and art collector is rediscovered.

Inspired by the classical world, the Walker Art Building’s donors brought ancient collections and Renaissance-revival architecture to Bowdoin College.

An exploration of Warren’s donations to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art elucidates his desire to create opportunities for future generations of students to intimately engage with art as an essential educational experience.