User:Rhetoricus/The Department of Classics at The Johns Hopkins University

The Department of Classics at The Johns Hopkins University new article content ...

When The Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876, the Board of Trustees and the first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, sought to implement the research-intensive, specialized graduate training then current in Germany. Since the Civil War, American universities had moved gradually toward more utilitarian studies. But among the more traditional educators, training in Greek and Latin remained essential to secondary and higher education. Given this climate, the Board of Trustees chose a classicist as Johns Hopkins' first professor. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve established the Greek Seminary in 1878.

By the nineteenth century, the Germans had developed a comprehensive, scientific discipline in the fild of classical studies, which they called Altertumswissenschaft (the science of antiquity). Hoping to emulate the German mode of scholarship, Gildersleeve was a native of South Carolina and a Civil War veteran. He had studied extensively in Germany, first at