author
Basil L. (Basil Lanneau) Gildersleeve
1831–1924
A pioneering American classicist, he helped shape the study of Greek and Latin in the United States and spent decades building one of the field’s leading journals. His work joined exacting scholarship with a long teaching career at the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins.
1 Audiobook
The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915
by Basil L. (Basil Lanneau) Gildersleeve
About the author
Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1831, Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve became one of the best-known American scholars of the ancient world. He studied at Princeton and later in Germany, an experience that strengthened the rigorous philological approach that marked his career.
He taught at the University of Virginia before joining the newly founded Johns Hopkins University in 1876 as professor of Greek. He is especially remembered as the founding editor of the American Journal of Philology, and for influential work on Greek and Latin grammar, syntax, and Greek literature.
Gildersleeve died in 1924. Modern accounts of his life also note that, alongside his major scholarly achievements, he defended Confederate and proslavery views; for readers today, that forms an important and troubling part of his legacy.