Despite being branded racist, sexist and irrelevant to contemporary students' lives, the so-called "Great Books" are making a great comeback in some unlikely places: community colleges with largely minority student bodies, homeless shelters, shelters for battered women, and Native American reservations, to name just a few. The appeal of the classics, the founders of the Great Books programs claim, is the same today as when Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois studied them: they arm students with the knowledge needed to participate fully as citizens in our democracy. "'I Sit With Shakespeare and He Winces Not': The Great Books and the Burgeoning of Citizenship," by Katherine A. Kersten, American Experiment Quarterly, Summer 2002.
