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How American invocations of ancient Greece produced varieties of cultural and historical loss

Ancient Greece has often been used as a part of a triumphalist story about American exceptionalism and invulnerability to loss. In The Recovery of Loss, Emily Greenwood shows how attempts to locate ancient Greece in modern America have produced different types of cultural and historical loss as well as ways of making loss intelligible. Across three chapters, Greenwood examines the interweaving of ancient Greece in accounts of Native American, African American, and Asian American histories,]. The nineteenth-century historian Horatio Bardwell Cushman (1820-1904), for example, superimposed ancient Greek history onto Indigenous history when he substituted passages from Thucydides for the words of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and the Choctaw chief Pushmataha-making ancient Greece overshadow Native American history in the very act of representing that history.

Greenwood goes on to describe how Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) and Mary Church Terrel (1863-1954), used their knowledge of ancient Greece to articulate the losses sustained by Black women intellectual leaders. For these writers, the intellectual and moral purpose of turning to ancient Greece was to make past and present losses palpable. Finally, Greenwood draws from contemporary poetry and the work of Monica Youn and Ocean Vuong, which recycles the containers of Greek myths to replenish loss, giving tangible outlines to diverse Asian American immigrant and refugee experiences. These Greek-struck stories of loss, Greenwood shows, are an important source of new knowledge about North American histories.