Saturday, January 27, 2018

The use of Latin in the Civil War era

A recent article by Andrew Dinan in The Classical Journal (Vol 113, No. 2) argues that Latin was quite widely used in the United States during the Civil War.  The article describes Latin poems, inscriptions, letters, and reports and essays.  Among them is an inscription at a Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was designed "to express, though imperfectly, the gratitude felt to those of our countrymen who have given their lives to achieve the greatest moral and social results of modern times."  The inscription nicely sums up the Civil War:
AMERICA CONSERVATA
AFRICA LIBERATA
POPULO MAGNO ASSURGENTE
HEROUM SANGUINE FUSO


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