The first edition of Unit I of the Cambridge Latin Course was published by the Cambridge University Press in 1970, and subsequent Units and Handbooks appeared in the years following; Unit V, the last in the series, was published in 1974. The Cambridge Latin Course (hereafter called the CLC) was innovative and attractive, and within a few years had been adopted by between a third and a half of the schools offering Latin in England and Wales. The CLC, though not formally advertised in the United States and Canada, was also adopted experimentally or formally by so many schools and colleges that by 1979, when planning for the second edition of the series was begun, a third of all sales of the CLC were in North America. (In 1976, for example, after three years of pilot tests in three Greater Vancouver secondary schools, the British Columbia (Canada) Ministry of Education had prescribed the CLC for all provincial schools offering Latin in British Columbia.) The early success of the CLC in North America was due largely to the widely appreciated visits of CLC officials and authors: in 1972, David J. Morton and E. Patricia Story, to a conference on innovative Latin textbooks sponsored by the Department of Classics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; in 1974, David J. Morton, to a workshop for Latin teachers at McArthur College of Education, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.
    These British officials and authors were members of a Committee, or task force, called the University of Cambridge School Classics Project, which had conceived, written, evaluated, andwith the cooperation of the Cambridge University Pressdisseminated the CLC in Britain, in North America, and also in the Netherlands, Japan, South Africa, and in Commonwealth nations like Australia and New Zealand. The Cambridge School Classics Project (here-after called the Classics Project or, simply, the Project) was first funded in 1966 by the Nuffield Foundation with a grant of #34,000, and with later grants by the same Foundation and theSchools Council. The Schools Council was a semi-autonomous educational body set up by the British government, based in London, working chiefly to develop and support new curricula and examinations in British schools. The Schools Council, by virtue of its support of the Classics Project, held copyright to the Project's pub lications, both the CLC and also materials for the study of Classical civilizations such as the Foundation Courses, called The Greek World and The Roman World. When the Schools Council was dissolved, the copyright to publications of the Classics Project passed to the National Curriculum Council, which maintains its office in York.
     The Classics Project originally comprised a Director, David J. Morton, then Lecturer in Education at the University of Nottingham, and two collaborating authors, Clarence Greig and John A. Jones. Their office was located above a store at 21 Silver Street, Cambridge, but was moved, in 1968, to its present location at 17 Panton Street, Cambridge. The office in the house at 17 Panton Street, owned by the Department of Education, University of Cambridge, is currently administered by E. Patricia Story, the current Director of the Classics Project; Maire Collins is Secretary for the Classics Project at this office. David Morton retired from the Directorship of the Project in 1987 (still remaining as Honorary Consultant) and was succeeded by Patricia Story.
    In the late 1960s, when planning for the CLC, the Classics Project was influenced by the practice of more progressive teachers, particularly those who attempted, within the framework of traditional courses, to present their students with "Latin first"; this had been strongly advocated, in the 1950's and 1960's, by the handbooks for teachers which were written and distributed by Her Majesty's Inspectors. The Project also, reacting to the beginning of a disillusionment in structural linguistics, rejected the audiolingual methods (based on Skinnerian stimulus-response psychology) which had dominated the foreign-language teaching scene since World War II in both Britain and the United States; it preferred to structuralism a Chomskian approach in which rules of language were said to function, not only in single inflected words, but also across sentences and paragraphs. In the actualizing of Chomskian theory in the CLC, the Project was fortunate in the choice of its early consultant on linguistics, John Wilkins, who had a special talent for mediating the theories of Noam Chomsky to the Project's authors. As a result, the CLC aims to develop in students, by extensive practice in reading continuous Latin texts, a functional skill in reading which leads to the comprehension of Latin literature.
    The Classics Project, however, when planning for the CLC, were also responding to requirements imposed by the educational situation in Britain. Comprehensive schools for all students were replacing the former double tier of "grammar schools" for the most capable students and "secondary modern" schools for the rest. Additional subjects were making the school curriculum fuller. In summary, if Latin teachers and their subject were to survive, they had to reassess their subject. Particularly, as their class periods were being reduced, they needed to reconsider the long-term value of time-consuming activities like English-Latin composition, and as they were increasingly forced to keep enrollments high by appealing to students who by themselves were barely motivated to enroll for Latin, they also needed to consider how they would capture and maintain the interest of young people who had little or no background in Latin or other Classics. The Classics Project responded to these educational needs by designing a Latin textbook series which teaches primarily, though not exclusively, the skills of reading and comprehension, integrates culture with language so that students can learn the social background in a minimum of time, and reaches out with dramatic devices to capture students' attention and interest from the very beginning and to keep it thereafter.
    The Roman historical period which the Classics Project chose for illustration in the CLC was that of the early Empire. Their reason for this choice again reflected the contemporary need of teachers for topics which would capture and hold the interest of their students; for the early Empire seemed ideal for providing a historical background of topical interest. Its social and political structure was not only more colorful and widespread than that of the Republic, witness writers like Pliny and Tacitus, but also easier for students to understand and far easier for teachersgiven the larger number of physical remains dating to the period of the em pireto show in illustrations. Moreover. although the more readable poets, like Catullus, Vergil, and Ovid, dated to the period of the late Republic, Catullus' most interesting lyrics were about his personal life, and Vergil and Ovid reacted, each in his own way, to the establishment of the Empire by Augustus, the proto-Emperor.
    The two original authors in the Classics Project, Clarence Greig and John A. Jones, devised the plots and wrote the Latin stories for almost all of Units I,II, and III. Suggestions for choice of characters and locales were gathered by a consultant on Classical civilization, Martin Forrest. When the Classics Project had largely polished the Stages (or "chapters") through Unit III, Stage 26, two additional writers, David C. Chandler and Robin M. Griffin, joined the Project. They, assisted by Dr Pieter Seuren as linguistic adviser, helped write the remaining Stages of Unit III, 27-31, and select and adapt material from Latin authors for Units IV and V.
    The Latin stories in the CLC have frequently been praised for their depth of characterization, realistic motivation, and sensitive reflection of the Roman social background, and there is no doubt that Clarence Greig was to a high degree responsible for these qualities. He was a Classicist of remarkable imagination with special talent for holding students' attention while simultaneously teaching them, and his death in 1978 was a great loss to the Classics Project and to the Classics profession in general. But Greig's work has been carried on ably by Robin M. Griffin, present Revision Editor of the CLC, who has revised many of Greig's stories and written several new ones for the Second Edition of the CLC, especially for Unit IVA.
    In the decade after the appearance of the CLC, the series attracted much experimentation and comment. College and University teachers who taught Latin to students who had begun with the CLC, commented positively on their ability in literary appreciation and criticism, less positively on their knowledge of the mechanics of grammar. The Classics Project, therefore, in cooperation with the Cambridge University Press, began planning, in 1979, a second edition of the CLC which would help students better integrate and consolidate their knowledge of grammar. They decided to level somewhat the steep gradient of implicit grammar in the stories of Unit III by simplifying and reorganizing the stories in old Stages 21-28, and by rewriting and adding stories to old Stages 29-31 (published in the North American Third Edition as Stages 35-40 of Unit 4). They also decided to add sections of explicit grammar (called ''About the language"), more learning activities (called "Practising the language"), and a full section of exercises for reviewing word forms, rules, and sentence patterns (in a separate section called ''Language Information"). Much of this master plan was drawn up by the Revision Editor, Robin M. Griffin, who then proceeded to implement it meticulously.
    In 1980, David J. Morton and E. Patricia Story returned to the United States, this time with Rosemary Davidson, new Editorial Director, Schoolbooks, for the Cambridge University Press, to consult with American and Canadian teachers. These meetings were held in New England, in conjunction with the Institute of the American Classical League at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, and with the New England Latin Institute and Workshop at Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts. As a result of these meetings, the Classics Project engaged Professor Ed Phinney, then Chair of the Department of Classics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst (where the CLC was adopted, in 1975-1994, for classes in elementary and intermediate Latin), to rewrite the students' Language Information pamphlets or sections and the teachers' handbooks specifically to meet the needs of North American students and teachers, e.g. by using the American case order in paradigms of nouns, and by describing classroom procedure in terms used by North American teachers. The students' textbooks, the heart of the series, were to be compatible and sold on both sides of the Atlantic. This compatibility was rather difficult, if not impossible to achieve, though the Classics Project and Classics Editors from the Cambridge University Pressfirst Ann le Neve Foster, then Elizabeth Bowden and Keith Rose and Ed Phinney worked hard, with mixed success, to find English words and idioms which would be comprehensible in Britain, the United States, and Canada. The style of punctuation, however, and many of the analogies remained British. Unit I, in both the British and the North American Second Edition, was published by the Cambridge University Press in 1982, and the final textbook of the revised series, called Unit IVB, in 1988. The North American Second Edition was dis tributed in the United States by the American Branch of the Cambridge University Press; and in Canada, by the Irwin Publishing Company, Concord, Ontario.
    The North American Second Edition of the CLC won far more adoptions in the United States and Canada, at both the secondary and college level, than had the British First Edition. The reasons for the increased number of adoptions reflected partly the teachers' gratitude for the North American adaptation, partly the similarity in the United States and Canada of the educational conditions which had led to the formulation of the CLC in the beginning, viz, fewer hours for classroom instruction and more classes with students of very mixed ability. The inevitable result of this success, however, was an increasing pressure from teachers for an entirely North American version, with American style of punctuation and North American analogies throughout, more attention to the context of the historical and social background (North American students are less familiar with the physical sites of the Roman empire than are British students.), and a format with hard covers, larger pages, and color illustrations, which is more like that of other North American Latin textbooks.
    A new committee was formed, therefore, in 1987 to prepare the North American Third Edition of the CLC. This new committee, called the North American Cambridge Classics Project (NACCP), included among its officers Professor Ed Phinney as Director and Patricia E. Bell (Centennial Collegiate and Vocational Institute, Guelph, Ontario, Canada) as Publications Officer. They supervised the writing of the North American Third Edition of the CLC from 1988 to 1992. The Third Edition comprises four hardbound students' textbooks, called Units 1, 2, 3, and 4, with accompanying Students' Workbooks and Teacher's Manuals, as well as a Latin reference grammar called A Student's Latin Grammar, written by Robin M. Griffin (Manchester, England) and edited for North American students by Ed Phinney. Since 1987, the NACCP has managed a Resource Center currently located in Staunton, Virginia with Richard Popeck as Director. The Center publishes many supplemental teaching aids for CLC teachers, including computer software and educational videotapes. The NACCP has also sponsored teachers' workshops in the U.S. (most recently in Norfolk, Virginia, and San Antonio, Texas) and teachers' tours to areas that are featured in the CLC, such as England, Egypt, Israel, and Italy. The NACCP committee meets annually in June, in conjunction with the Institute of the American Classical League.
    For further information about the activities, tours, workshops , newsletter, and examinations published by North American Cambridge Classics Project , write to the NACCP 1083 Independence Blvd. #110 Virginia Beach, VA 23455.