American History Hit - Romans in America

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Why was there once a fashion for styling your hair like Brutus, the most famous of Julius Caesar's assassins? Why are there so many neoclassical buildings in the United States? And how was the Ancient Roman Empire once used as a justification for the system of enslavement?Find out in this episode, as Don is joined by Caroline Winterer, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University. Caroline is the author of five books, most recently 'How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. In the North Carolina State Capitol, light streams through the windows of the Central Dome, illuminating a marble figure, reclining with quiet dignity on a nearly six-foot-tall plinth.

The figure, carved in Roman military armor, displays toned legs, arms, and an exposed navel, partially draped in a heavy robe cascading over his left arm. In his right hand, he holds a marble pen. poised above a tablet in his left. Inscribed upon the tablet are the words, George Washington, to the people of the United States, 1796,

Friends and Citizens. It is the first president of the United States, immortalized in stone, as he drafts his 1796 farewell address. Yet his attire, a style too millennia outdated, was not of his choosing. This Romanized vision was the directive

of Thomas Jefferson, who commissioned the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova for the original work. Jefferson, favoring classical ideals, dismissed contemporary fashion, writing, As to the style or costume, I am sure the artist and every person of taste in Europe would be for the Roman. Our boots and regimentals have a very puny effect. Hey there, nice to have you with us. I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit. The Roman Empire lasted for about 500 years, from 27 BC to 476 AD. It reached from northern Africa, around the Mediterranean, including the Balkan, Italian, and Iberian Peninsula all the way to the British Isles. It was not the largest empire in human history, but for Western civilization, it was certainly the most influential.

What happened in Rome, lessons of civic governance, among others, did not stay in Rome. It spread far and wide across time, eventually setting roots in the fertile soil of a brand new nation called the United States of America. This Roman diaspora of civic and cultural ideas, their journey across the centuries and an ocean, has been a major focus of Professor Carolyn Winterer, the William Robertson Co. Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, chair of the department, specializing in American history before 1900. She has authored numerous books and articles, among them most recently, how the new world became old. The Deep Time Revolution in America, published just this year. Greetings. Professor Carolyn Winter is so nice to meet you. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you. So we're about to discuss how high-minded Roman ideals became essential to the founding of the U.S.

But let's begin with something very familiar to everyone. The classically inspired architecture so prevalent across America, certainly in the nation's capital. There is no more obvious demonstration. of how committed our founders and their ancestors were to the Greeks and Romans, so many columns and porticos and pediments. How did this thing happen in America? Were we all intended to feel like Romans? We were all intended to feel like Romans. From the moment of the American Revolution, between 1776 and 1788, Americans began to shift their attention

from the monarchy of King George III in England, who had now come to symbolize. everything that was awful and autocratic to the Republic of ancient Rome. And so after the revolution, beginning in 1788, they began to erect columns and porticos and all kinds of gleaming white architecture across the cities of the new United States. As you said, most obviously, it's visible in the city of Washington, D.C., which arose as a brand new city from the swamps of Maryland and northern Virginia in the 1790s. Now, if they had really known about ancient Roman architecture, they would have known that it was garishly colored, but they only had known Roman architecture from ruins, and so all the paint had been scraped off. And so all of the American neoclassicism is gleaming

white. It comes all at the same time as the popularity of the grand tour in Europe had sort of risen up, and we were suddenly discovering these ancient things like the pyramids and so forth. Thomas Jefferson, of course, has everything to do with this, bringing this neoclassical principle over here. Tell us how he was met with when he brought these ideas to the four. Well, he was met with great enthusiasm. He spent five years in France as one of the American ministers during the 1780s. And in fact, in 1789, he came face to face with an actual ancient Roman temple in the south of France, a little temple in Needs. in the city of Neiman, France, which used to be a Roman colony.

And he loved it so much that he wrote to one of his female friends in Paris, an aristocratic lady. And he said, oh, I am gazing at this temple like a lover at his mistress. So he loved this thing. He had a copy made. And he shipped it to Virginia and said to his colleagues there, you need to make the new state capital in Richmond look exactly like this. So the state capital building in Richmond is the first neoclassical federal building in the United States. It's not technically federal because it's a state capital, but the architecture of the new federal state and local government begins to be in this style that is not classical revival. So it's not like 17th or 18th century classical architecture that was newly built in Europe at that time.

it was actually ancient Roman. But unlike real ancient Roman architecture, it's not crumbling, right? It's all brand new to symbolize the novelty and wonderfulness of the new American Republic. They hoped. Right. I mean, we were taking this from the Renaissance, of course. I mean, Palladio and all that. And the British, of course, practiced this idea in London, you know, putting up these buildings.

It was happening all over Europe. But the idea of so much of it and such a commitment to it was kind of outflanking the British at their game, wasn't it? They were outflanking the British at their game. And, you know, the Americans had the added challenge of having to try to rid themselves of the hated architecture of monarchy, which is what today we call colonial architecture. But it's also Georgian architecture. It's sort of classical looking, but it's mostly red brick. You see it on the East Coast a lot, not here in California. On the East Coast, it's brick. And it has sort of white classical columns. But now Americans looked at that and they said, oh, no, no, we don't want that anymore. That's symbolizing monarchy. We want to, if not tear it down, we want to have people looking instead to new cities like Washington, D.C., and relegating this other architecture to the colonial past. All of it, of course, was symbolic, still is.

The idea that this public architecture was this expression of the ideals of the classical ancients. Most of all, the notion of a balance of power, checks and balance. You know, you look at a building. It is balanced. It is very solid. It has a big foundation, obviously a symbol. This is the beginning of all of that being utilized in the creation of our government, isn't it? That's exactly right. They took away from the Romans to some extent, the idea of long-lived governments having a balance among different constituencies in society, the monarchical element, the aristocratic element, which would have been embodied in the Roman Senate, and then the people's assemblies. Now, the novelty that Americans craft in 1788 in the new U.S.

Constitution is to actually get rid of the monarchical and aristocratic elements and to say, no, no, no, we're not just going to have a kind of balanced government. We're only going to have the people in charge, and we are going to separate those powers into the three branches of government. So it's a little bit confusing, right, because we have balanced government on the one hand and a balance of powers on the other hand. So I spend a lot of time with my students clarifying this. But the novelty of the U.S. government in 1788 is to say all the powers of government, whether it's judicial, executive or legislative, is going to come from the people alone.

and it merely will be channeled in different ways in the various branches of government. But the United States does not have a monarchy, unlike the government of Rome, unlike the government of Great Britain, nor does it have an aristocracy. In fact, the Constitution disallows the U.S. government from giving out titles of nobility. Where this comes from is what's fascinating to me and how it's communicated to the common people. I mean, that's why I chose to start this conversation with architecture so that I think it was really the powers that be placing something so obviously in the middle of town that says, you know, we're going back to this place, folks. We're taking it back to Rome. But it was also in the popular entertainment, you know, Julius Caesar had been performed in 1599. So all of these Shakespearean plays and so forth were talking about this stuff. But how was it really communicated? I mean, was this actually written up in editorials in the broadsides or? As weird as it. might seem to us today, it absolutely was. I actually refer to this time period up until about the Civil War as the culture of classicism. It's just saturating American culture. So education from kindergarten forward, although there's no kindergartens until after the Civil War, but

very early education, you learn Latin, you might even learn Greek, which is a very difficult language because it has a different alphabet. People take on classical names. So you, Don, might call yourself Brutus, which is certainly Or Dinaldus. Also Dinaldus and I will be Carolina.

But Abigail Adams signs some of her letters to John Adams as Portia. As I always say, you know, not the car, but the wife of Brutus, the guy who stabbed Julius Caesar, who was a threat to the Republic, people would dress in what are called Grecian robes, what our listeners might know as

Jane Austen dresses, you know, those white columnar dresses that you see in Jane Austen movies. Those are explicitly modeled on the outfits that ancient Roman women would wear. Men started styling their hair in a style that was called the Brutus. You can try this at home. You'd like comb your hair forward. So you see a lot of portraits from around 1790 to 1820 with men wearing their hair that way. Furniture and a famous kind of way of posing in a portrait, which again our listeners might have seen in museums where men put their hand in their coat.

It's called a hand in coat, but it's actually supposed to be modeled on an ancient Roman putting his hand in his toga. So all of these are ways of signaling both. overtly and subtly that, boy, you know the ancient Romans and you're communicating this. I'm so glad we're having this conversation because I think about this all the time. I mean, it's for all the reasons we've discussed, you know, you see it in the buildings and so forth, but it really is this sort of settled feeling like, I get it. I understand where this nation kind of builds itself from.

The foundation is really solid. And as much as we can joke about it and it's worthy of joking, it really does serve the purpose of giving this country, this really solid platform to build on to. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. There's a famous classical figure named Cincinnati, who figures prominently in the, certainly the military aspect of this, too. Can you talk a bit about his importance? Cincinnati is a somewhat legendary figure. We don't know a ton about him, but he's a sort of farmer type who lives in the third century BC in ancient Rome. and at a certain critical point when Rome is under attack, he puts down his plow and takes up the

sword and helps to defend Rome from attack. And of course, Rome began to expand enormously at this time. So it was constantly at war. But the critical move that Cincinnati makes is that when he is done fighting, he doesn't keep his sword and continue to fight. He puts down his sword and takes up the plow again. in other words, he knows that he's not going to be a warlord and threaten Rome by creating a kind of dictatorial martial republic. Instead, he embodies the values of ancient Roman civic virtue, which is the gentle virtues of the farmer. And 90% of Romans were farmers, and significantly 90% of Americans are farmers until after the civil war. So there's this deep identification with what we would think of today as the values of the Midwest, right? The solid farming values.

That's why George Washington models himself on Cincinnati, that after he resigns his commission to the Continental Army, which he had commanded during the American Revolution, this is in 1783, he returns to Mount Vernon saying, I don't want power. I resign power like Cincinnati. Yeah, exactly, which also plays into the ideal that used to be the case in the states that we didn't have really a standing army, a national army. It was more of state militias, state and local militias that were then gathered, even up into the civil war. It's not really until the 20th century that that idea even becomes a part of it because it was such a threat. It was such an idea of tyranny. That's exactly right. And they looked, in fact, at the European monarchies that did have standing armies and said, oh, we don't want to be like that. We don't want to be like Napoleon.

We don't want to be like the big armies of Frederick, the grade of Prussia. Our soldiers are ultimately farmers. And the highest act of civic virtue is to think first of the United States, as they imagined Roman farmers did, to think first of Rome. And when duty calls, you take up the sword, but then you always return to the farm so that you can feed the people of Rome. And this is seen as nurturing and as the all. ultimate act of patriotism. Yeah, I want to go back to the Senate for a moment. We sort of blew past that.

And I want to know, you mentioned aristocracy as being the land-owning nobles who were meant to sort of balance out the government and certainly any kind of monarchical influence by being this strong body that would hold a lot of power. When does it change? I guess it's with the vote, right? When the Senate becomes popularly voted for, that all really changes. Right. The ancient Roman Senate, rather confusingly, is not a sort of voting body in the same way that the United States Senate is, and it certainly isn't representative in the same way that the U.S. Senate is. The ancient Roman Senate, which, you know, even today is idolized by the people of Rome. If you go to the city of Rome, you'll see that the manhole covers, say SPQR, the Senate and people of Rome, Senatos Populuscoe Romanum. And this is a believed to embody the particular virtues that made ancient Rome last so long. So the ancient Roman Senate sort of first emerges around 500 BC to advise the first kings of Rome. And during the long Republican period of about 500 years, it emerges as the part of the Roman governmental powers

that is advisory, that is believed to be wise. That's why it's called the Senate. because it's made of old people, which is where senile sent Senate comes from that. And that's why, you know, the U.S. Senate has this 30-year-old age requirement. And they also deliberate, importantly, on when Rome should go to war. And for the Romans, the answer to that question is always, well, now, you know, we should go to war. So they're a very important counterweight to what are believed to be the more sort of upstart, popular elements of society that they don't trust very much. Oh, and I should say that they, when Rome becomes an empire in the very late first century BC and all the way to its quote

fall in 476 AD, there's still a Senate, but it is increasingly merely kind of embellishment to the growing powers of the emperor. And in fact, there's a Roman Senate until like after the Renaissance and then finally it sort of dies away. But when the United States is sort of figuring out, how are we going to create this new representative government that rests on the power of the people, they steal this word Senate from ancient Rome, but they create a wholly new structure out of it

that the Romans would not have really recognized this idea of representative government, representing states in a federated way. this is all very kind of jerry-rigged, you know, and don't tell James Madison, I said that, but it's a wholly new way of imagining government, even though their love of ancient Rome is captured in this word, the Senate. It's almost like a religion of sorts. I mean, it's almost a spiritual quality to it that this new nation, any nation, needs as a background. Whereas in Europe, you had so much Catholicism in the old days and all of that spiritualism gave structure. this is a way of sort of utilizing ideas and a sort of spirit, as I say, but it's not religion, because we don't do that.

That's exactly right. The U.S., you know, very early on commits to this wall of separation between church and state. But you're absolutely right that the reverence for classical models is a way to create a civic religion, if not a kind of monotheistic religion. Exactly. And to get that to the people, which I've said before in this conversation, such an important part of it, is through education. I mean, they really lean hard on classical education. You've already mentioned it. But even I took Latin in the 80s and I got an A, I might add.

Two courses, I can say this. That's the only thing I remember. It says, with the good plow, I will make peas happen or something like that. That's so Roman of you, farming. Yeah, exactly. was all about agrarian stuff. But this classical element of education was everywhere. How was that meant to affect the population? So yes, classical education was everywhere, especially if you were an elite boy. It was believed to make you a man with all of the qualities that young men needed at that time.

You know, there's no radio. There's no television. So you need to be a great orator. You need to create your ideas logically. You know, so many people are lawyers, so you need to be able to debate things, et cetera. So many young people would have learned it in their primary education, definitely Latin, if not Greek. Where it really came into play was in American College Education, which was saturated with classicism during the whole four years. In fact, what we would today called the freshman and sophomore years, the first two years, was entirely Greek and Latin. And you only were released from that in your final two years to do a little bit of calculus and then to be taught of philosophy class by the president who was not yet a fundraiser. So you spend so much

time in college mastering both these ancient languages, but also the whole ancient way that the Romans and the Greeks had looked at the world, that they constructed the world in certain ways, but not in others. So, for example, science, which is so important to American education, was essentially non-existent in American college education until after the Civil War when it became, you know, a big, big new thing. And the classics began to decline. But it was a whole worldview, really. Even on the residential side. I mean, you have antiquity is all throughout the homes. It's the wallpaper of the world. the phrase that's used. Artifacts in the home. I'm sorry, I'm making this all about myself, but my little 1600 square foot house, I even looked it up on Zillow, where I grew up in New Jersey, very modest small home. In our front hall had four Doric columns. It was crazy, taking up so much space.

Well, good for you. Good for your parents, you know. So yeah, we've been talking about the Romans, but the Doric style is actually ancient Greek. So I'm guessing your house might have been built in the 19th century, because that's the moment when the Greeks really begin to capture the American imagination. At first, it had been the Romans. And that was really important during the revolution because the Romans had this aristocratic form of government. And people like James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, they wanted to build a republic, but they didn't want to surrender a lot of power to the common people. They didn't trust the common people. So Rome was their model. By the middle of the 19th century, the vote has expanded to include many, many more men than it had before. And they begin

now to turn to ancient Greece as their model for a democracy. And instead of idolizing ancient Rome, which is always hovering in the background, they turn to ancient Athens as the seat of democracy. And that's when you start getting houses like yours that have these Doric columns, which are supposed to symbolize the earliest days of ancient Greece. You know, the Doric style is that very simple, massive style. And they saw it as being very manly and masculine. None of this frou-frew Corinthian style stuff like you see in some Roman columns. This was bold. This was democratic. This spoke for the common man like Andrew Jackson. So if you drive around, not just New Jersey, but also the antebellum South, for example, you'll see that a lot of former slave plantations

are not just in the Roman style, but because they were built during the moment when the Cotton South emerged between 1820 and 1860, this brings us to the Greek moment in American architecture and a lot of the plantation houses are in actually Greek revival architecture. That's fascinating. And that will go hand in hand with the populist movement of that time. And the pressure that eventually leads to the 12th Amendment, right? The vote for the Senate. That's exactly right. That comes out of that Greek desire for democracy. Interesting. And it also actually brings us to this new invention of the Western Civ course or even the whole idea that there is a thing called Western civilization, which some of our listeners may be saying,

well, of course there was a Western civilization. And, you know, there may or may not have been, but it is a new idea that grips Americans by the end of the Civil War period that we have a beginning in political history, and it's the Greeks. And so the best kinds of college courses won't necessarily teach the Greek and Latin languages, because now you need to do science and engineering and all these things for a modern technocratic society. We're in about the year 1900 now. But in Instead, we're going to teach all men and women in college the essentials of where their nation came from. Of course, first it came from 1776, but then it came from Rome. And before that, it came from Greece, the cradle of democracy.

So that's where that idea comes from. One institution that finds its roots in Rome also is enslavement, is slavery. And often people have used that to justify what happened in America, two different kinds of systems entirely. Both the United States and ancient Rome and Greece were what classical scholars called slave societies. This is a technical term, slave society. A slave society is one in which roughly 30 to 40 percent of the population is enslaved, and in which the whole economy and political structure sort of depends on the existence of a large number of slaves. So you have slave codes, for example, that make it illegal to emancipate your slaves, et cetera, et cetera. So Greece qualifies for that. Rome qualifies for that. And the United States, before the Civil War,

qualifies for that designation. During the era of the American Revolution, around 1780, there were about 700,000 slaves in the United States. By the eve of the Civil War in 1861, there are four million. In some, States like Mississippi, those slaves form a majority of the population. Mississippi has a slave population of about 55% on the eve of the Civil War. So it qualifies as a slave society. And for the white planters in the slave South who feared slave rebellion above all else, they were outnumbered for sure, they liked to imagine that they, these white slaveholds, were, in fact, the benevolent citizens of ancient Rome, that patrician class that was freed for service to Rome in, for example, the Senate precisely because they owned slaves. Otherwise, they would

be at home having to do a lot of drudgery. But it was the presence of slave labor. These white planters told themselves that freed them for sort of philosophical and wise governance of Rome. So that's why you see a lot of Roman and Greek revival architecture in the Antebellum South. If you drive through it today, especially places like Louisiana and Mississippi, where the concentration of slaves was the highest. So that's today, of course, a very shameful and dark chapter in American history. But at the time, many white Americans celebrated that parallel between ancient Greece and Rome and modern United States. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

But the American system or the southern system of slavery was very different from that which Rome practiced in terms of like the lifelong slavery, generational slavery, the commercial aspect of it. It was a much crueler system than what I understand it being practiced in Rome. Ancient Roman and Greek slavery was also very cruel. It's hard to find a slave society in which slavery is not a, a, terrible condition to be in. But as you say, there are many, many differences. First of all, as you're pointing out, American slavery is race-based and generational. As early as 1660, there are laws

on the books in Virginia saying that the slavery follows the condition of the mother. So a white master would intentionally propagate his number of slaves by creating a slave population with his female slaves. In ancient Rome, by contrast, slavery is more of what we call raid and capture slavery. So as Rome is expanding, slave traders are following the armies, and they will go in and enslave all of the subdued societies and sell those people into slavery elsewhere in the empire. What that means is that we do not believe that slavery was race-based in the ancient world. Now, it may have been that there were slaves of different ethnicities and linguistic groups, but it was not exclusively the provenance of largely one race as it was in the United States, especially on the eve of the

Civil War. So, you know, as you're saying, white planters like to imagine all these parallels, but in fact, one of the wonderful things that modern classical scholars have done is to excavate the many differences that there are between ancient and modern slave systems. The inevitable discussion that happens here is the building of the empire, if we're going to become an empire, first of all, but also that Rome builds one. But then it collapses. And everyone in this time in America is versed on the fact that this whole rise and fall is part of this story. How much did they fear the same here? And did they see that as inevitably happening on the North American continent? Well, this is the defining story of the United States. You know, one of the many things that they love about ancient Rome and the founding era is that unlike so many other parts of the world, the histories of the world, it has a very clear trajectory. It rises and then it falls, right, over this neat thousand-year period. And so by saying that the new United States is the Republic of Rome, they're setting themselves up for the fear that every American from that day forwarding,

including us, carries with them, which is the fear that Rome will fall. And that fear begins to be articulated as soon as the ink on the Constitution has dried. Americans are looking over their shoulders saying, okay, well, this is really great. We're the new Rome, the Novus Ordosiclorum. What are we going to fall? What are the signs? Is it already happening? Et cetera. So, of course, in the wake of 9-11, Americans began to publish a million books saying, are we, Rome that's just a very typical American move to be looking for the rise of the Republic, but then also the fall of the Republic or the fall of the empire. Probably the most famous series of paintings about this.

They're marvelous. They're on display in Washington, D.C. It's a series of five canvases by the Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole. It's called The Course of Empire series. Everybody can Google it on their laptops. but over five canvases, Thomas Cole in the 1830s, just, you know, when the United States has passed the half-century mark, gives a trajectory of, you know, the rise of some republic, maybe the U.S., maybe Rome, he never tells us, it's rise, and then it's ignominious and

violent fall. And, you know, he's asking us a question, what caused the fall? America had just reached the Pacific. Maybe it was imperialism, but he also, shows Americans being luxury-loving and essentially, you know, whatever the 1830s equivalent of a shopping mall is, he shows that. So maybe we're overly materialistic, but something has caused the decline and fall of this wonderful young empire. And I would say even today, you know, we just had an election. It's out there again, right? And it has never left us. Have we peaked? Are we falling? This is the discourse of Rome. And it's baked into the United States.

Yeah. And you wonder, I mean, which side of the political spectrum embraces, more embraces these classical ideas today? I suppose it's the right. I'm not sure, though. I think, you know, everybody's in on it, right? Because it's useful. It's endlessly malleable. It's, you know, anthropologists would call this a floating signifier.

You can, it's an empty vessel. You can put in it whatever you want. But it does tend to be more the province of the political. right, in part because classical education is believed to be kind of rigorous foundational kind of education. And once that falls away and is replaced in the late 19th century by, you know, education for the masses, the public school movement, this is believed to be kind of eroding of the tough masculine virtues of America. And so, well, Whenever you see, you know, frightening things happening on the American political horizon, there is a tendency on the right, but not exclusively on the right, to embrace classical values as somehow being more solid than any other kind of value.

It's like a column, right? You can hang on to it in the storm, and it will hold you fast while you weather these terrible events. So to summarize, what lessons can we learn from the collapse of the Roman Empire to defend ourselves from the same here? Well, I wish we had a tidy answer. You know, there have been over 200 reasons given for the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. Everything from, you know, as was popular in the 1960s, the theory that, you know, empires have a certain size, you know, like a mammal, like an elephant beyond which they cannot grow. you know, hello Soviet Union, if you try to grow much further, you know, you'll pop like the Roman Empire did. So there's that theory. There's the theory that put Edward Gibbons' decline and fall on the banned books list in Europe in the 1780s, which is that, in fact, the rise of Christianity causes the decline and fall of Rome because all of the martial virtues of the

manly Roman soldier are eroded and replaced with the soft, effeminate virtues of Christianity, which tell you to turn the other cheek and to look at the afterlife, the world beyond, rather than this world. So I wish I could tell you that there were one thing we could look out for to say, oh, gosh, the U.S. has started its decline. But I think going back to this idea of the floating signifier again, what makes Rome so powerful in American political discourse is precisely that we don't know why Rome fell. and many scholars would actually say that it didn't fall, it just transformed into the warring micro-kingdoms of the Middle Ages. But once everybody agrees on something, it becomes boring. What makes things exciting and fun is that precisely we do debate about them and we do argue about them. So Rome is perfect because we all know a little bit about it.

You know, we know that it was sort of in the past and that it was really great and that it had these classical. buildings and that we're supposed to admire it. And then we go where we want with it. And so we're going to see that continuing to unfold. But I'm hearing from you today that its usefulness played itself out. Is it an obsolete idea that we are related to Rome or are we still in love with the idea? I mean, there's a lot of McMansions with those pillars. I can see it all over the place. Yes, there are a lot of McMansions with pillars. And I think there will always be McMansions with pillars. I don't think the idea has played itself out. I think we can always learn new things from ancient Rome.

You know, we're just studying slave systems, studying trading systems, studying the ancient economy. Rome is ever renewing, even as the sciences and engineering and AI, all of these things are important. But Rome will always attract us because it's so rich and full. Carolyn Winner is the William Robertson co-professor of History, and American Studies at Stanford University. She specializes in American history before the 1900s, especially the history of ideas and the history of science.

She's also chair of that department. We were lucky to have her. I recommend her new book entitled How the New World Became Old, the Deep Time Revolution in America. Carolyn, where else can we find work of yours and follow your teaching? I just released a whole course

on America and ancient Rome with the teaching company. So look for the great courses. and you can find that. I have a couple of books about Americans and the ancient world. So culture of classicism and the mirror of antiquity, it's all out there. Thank you very much. Thank you so much.

It was a pleasure to be here. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great,

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