The Mystique of the Ancient Greek Olympics

The ancient Greeks had a passion for athletics that makes our own enthusiasm for sports seem lukewarm by comparison. Typically, they staged their games in their most hallowed sacred spaces; some of their most successful athletes were literally worshipped hundreds of years after their deaths at purpose-built shrines; and ultimately they even came to measure the passage of time itself by the stately sequence of quadrennial Olympiads. How, then can we explain the extraordinary force and resonance of sports in Greek culture? My paper will attempt to answer this question by investigating the beginnings of organized athletics at ancient Olympia.

Professor Anderson is a specialist in the history of ancient Greece. He is a graduate of the universities of Newcastle and London in his native Britain, and holds M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in Classics from Yale University.

Professor Anderson's primary area of interest is political culture in Greek city-states during the archaic (700-480 BC) and classical (480-320 BC) periods. His work explores the dynamic interplay between politics and other key realms of human experience, especially art and architecture, cult, warfare, memory, and identity. His first book, The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508-490 BC (University of Michigan Press, 2003), rethinks the beginnings of democracy and civic order in ancient Athens. To date, he has nine other scholarly pieces in print or in press. Their topics range from the origins of the ancient Olympic games to social memory formation in classical Athens. Professor Anderson's principal current project is a second book, provisionally entitled The Invention of Citizenship, which reexamines patterns of early political development across the Greek world as a whole. Its ultimate aim is to offer a new way of looking at the creation of the world's first citizen-states.

Visit: http://history.osu.edu/people/person.cfm?ID=2101

by Dr. Greg Anderson
Assistant Professor of History, Ohio State University

Learning Like a Girl: Educating Our Daughters in Schools of Their Own

Faced with a spirited eleven-year-old daughter, a concern about what therapists have called a 'poisonous' youth culture - especially for girls - and a conviction that parents need powerful tools to help their daughters realize their potential, educator-activitst Meehan decided with two other mothers to create a new school based on social science and brain research about how girls learn best. The result, The Archer School in L.A., has in only ten years become a model for girls' schools nationwide. In this entertaining, inspiring book, Meehan describes her journey to create a nrew institution to serve girls first and foremost, while laying out through vivid stories and examples what girls need to thrive. She explains why co-education so often doesn't serve them (just as it doesn't serve boys), takes sides in the controversy over male/female learning differences, and advocates for schools' role in giving girls tools to navigate through our sexualized, materialistic culture. She also visits other schools around the country - private and public - to show how single sex education works, and how every girl everywhere can benefit from having a classroom of her own.

Diana Meehan, Ph.D., is the co-founder of the Archer School for Girls and founding-director of the Institute for the Study of Women and men at USC. She currently serves on the Board of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, the Children's Action Network, and the Communication Consortium Media Center. Meehan is a founding partner of VU Productions - a documentary film company attached to Paramount. Among her award-winning productions are Women in War (A&E) and A Century of Women (Turner Broadcasting). She is married to writer-producer Gary David Goldberg.

by Dr. Diana Meehan
B.A. English 1966
Author, Educator, Presidential Advisor
Documentary Producer