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With a twelve-month grant from the NEH, I will complete the research for and produce a draft of Black Minerva: African Americans and Classical Culture, a book that will explore how African Americans mobilized knowledge of classical texts and antiquity in their fight for liberty and equality. Throughout the 19th century African Americans legitimated and contested their political and cultural identities through selective references to the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean. References to antiquity were abundant but not stable: their meanings shifted in accordance with the ideological and political concerns of their producers. African Americans appropriated classic--most especially, for debates, explicit and implicit, about politics and culture.