Abstract
The American colonies were quickly developing a national identity. Well before their independence, they sought to establish institutions of higher learning that could serve local communities, thereby eliminating the need for youth to seek advanced scholarship in the universities of Europe. The chartering of America’s first colleges, beginning with Harvard in 1636, was a first step toward building academic centers that could someday compete with those of England or France. College-building escalated after the country won its independence. Between 1782 and 1802, 19 colleges were chartered, more than twice as many as had been founded in the previous 150 years. Curricular reform, given impetus by Jeremiah Day’s 1828 Yale Report, brought the sciences to the forefront of the nation’s course offerings, transforming Yale and other institutions into exciting hubs of discovery. By the mid-1800s, many internationally mobile students and scholars were turning their attention to the United States.
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Notes
- 1.
Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University, A History (Athens, GA and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1990): 3–5.
- 2.
Ibid., 5.
- 3.
Ibid., 4–6.
- 4.
Ibid., 4–22.
- 5.
Christopher J. Lucas, American Higher Education (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
- 6.
Rudolph, 23–43.
- 7.
John Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004): 1–9.
- 8.
Rudolph, 21.
- 9.
Thelin, 21.
- 10.
Rudolph, 68–85.
- 11.
Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith, eds. American Higher Education: A Documentary History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961).
- 12.
William E. Burns, Science and Technology in Colonial America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005).
- 13.
Barbara L. Narendra, “Benjamin Silliman and the Peabody Museum,” Discovery, Vol. 14 (1979): 13–29; also see Rudolph, The American College and University, 222.
- 14.
Rudolph, 223.
- 15.
A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray, 1810–1888 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1959).
- 16.
Samuel Elliot Morrison, There Centuries of Harvard 1636–1936 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936): 230–231; also see Teresa Brawner Bevis and Christopher J. Lucas, International Students in American Colleges and Universities: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 31–40.
- 17.
Rudolph, 125–127.
- 18.
William M. Brickman, “Historical Development of Governmental Interest in International Higher Education,” in Governmental Policy and International Education, Stewart Fraser, ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1965): 29.
- 19.
Jurgen Herbst, “The 1828 Yale Report,” The Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 11, no. 2 (2004): 213.
- 20.
Jonathan R. Cole, The Great American University (Public Affairs Publishers, 2002): 22–24.
- 21.
Anna Galicich, The German Americans (New York: Chelsea House, 1989); also see Theodore Huebener, The Germans in America (Philadelphia, PA: Chilton Book Co., 1962).
- 22.
Rudolph, 373–393; also see John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities, 1636–1976, 3rd edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1976): 131–136.
- 23.
Nathan M. Sorber, Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt: The Origins of the Morrill Act and the Reform of Higher Education (Cornell University Press, 2018).
- 24.
Paul H. Mattingly, “The Political Culture of America’s Antebellum Colleges,” History of Higher Education Annual, Vol. 17 (1997): 73–95.
- 25.
Rudolph, 44–67.
- 26.
Rudolph, 307–328.
- 27.
NCES, 2008.
References
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Bevis, T.B. (2019). The Rise of American Scholarship. In: A World History of Higher Education Exchange. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12434-2_3
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