About Us

Our Contributors

Bruce S. Thornton is one of Private Papers’ culture critics. As an observer of modern trends, he writes on current issues and reviews cultural forms for the web site. His education spans both ancient and modern civilization at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) where he studied Latin and Comparative Literature. Experience, however, comes from teaching the hoi polloi at California State University, Fresno where he is professor and chair of the Humanities Department.

He shares with the web site the sense of crisis in contemporary culture as educational institutions obfuscate, ignore, and otherwise diminish valuable wisdom of Classical Studies. Evident in his published works is the broad desire to prevent Classics from slipping through the cracks, and commentary on—and correction of—disinformation coming from the modern literati.  His books include:  Searching for Joaquin: Myth and History in California (Encounter Books, Fall 2002); Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age with John Heath and Victor Davis Hanson (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2001); Greek Way: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000); Humanities Handbook (Prentice-Hall, 2000); Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge (Wilmington, DE: ISI Press, 1999); Eros the Killer: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality (Boulder, Co.: Westview, 1997).

Thornton has appeared in National Review Online, Heterodoxy, The National Herald, Arion, The San Francisco Examiner, American Enterprise Magazine, University Bookman, Religious Studies Review, Intercollegiate Review, The Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, Helios, and the American Journal of Philology.

Thornton received his BA in Latin from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1975, and his PhD in Comparative Literature—Greek, Latin, and English—from UCLA in 1983.

Honora Howell Chapman is Associate Professor of Classics at California State University, Fresno. She teaches Greek and Latin courses for the Humanities Department along with Bruce Thornton.  She is the foremost authority on Flavius Josephus (37-100 A.D.), a first-century Roman historian whose extensive works provide our insight into the genesis of Christianity. Chapman links the website both with classical civilization and Christianity.

Chapman received her Ph.D. from Stanford in Classics and is currently writing a book on Josephus. She writes cultural criticism for Private Papers informed both by the Classics and her knowledge of traditional wisdom found in early Christian thinkers. Her essays then give the website a level-headed assessment of Christian principles that are the foundations of our society, without the blind adherence to Christian doctrine of a fanatic or the equally short-sighted rejection by secularists.

Joseph Tartakovsky is assistant editor at the Claremont Review of Books.

Jennifer Heyne currently teaches part-time for Fresno City College and California State University, Fresno. She is editor of Private Papers. She was trained as an historian of modern Europe at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she earned a Doctorate in Modern European History (1997), and as an economist at the University of California, Riverside where she earned a Masters in Economics (1990).

Editorial Staff

Jennifer Heyne, Editor, jheyne@victorhanson.com

Joseph Tartakovsky, Assistant Editor, joey@victorhanson.com