On the occasion of Tennessee's Bicentennial, four distinguished
authors offer new insights and a broader appreciation of the
classical influences that have shaped the architectural, cultural,
and educational history of its capital city.
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.
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