As the author of this article read through the fascinating ruminations of Drs. Albisetti, Finkelstein, Thelin, and Urban, it seemed to him that two basic points emerge, one conceptual and one methodological. Conceptually, Albisetti, Finkelstein, and Urban are asking historians of education to move away from national frames of reference to either a…

What topic would you choose if you had the luxury of writing forever? In this article, John Thelin provides his response: He would opt to write about the history of higher education in a way that relies on quantitative data. "Numbers, please!" is his research request in taking on a longitudinal study of colleges and universities over…

In August 1945, Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers. From September 1945 to April 1952, the United States occupied the defeated country. Douglas MacArthur, an American army general and the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), attempted to transform Japanese society from an authoritarian regime into a budding democracy.…

In the 1890s, the Board of Trustees of the not-yet-built University of Chicago had just elected Rainey Harper to be its first president, and later, he would formally accept the position. Harper left a secure position at Yale University to accept the presidency of a university that was nothing more than an idea, a board of trustees, and the…

During World War II, female students at the University of California, Berkeley--then the most populous undergraduate campus in American higher education--made significant advances in collegiate life. In growing numbers, women enrolled in male-dominated academic programs, including mathematics, chemistry, and engineering, as they prepared for…

In September 1830 the U.S. government negotiated the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek with some leaders of the Choctaw Nation. The treaty reinforced the congressional Indian Removal Act of 1830, which paved the way for the large-scale physical removal of tens of thousands of tribal people of the southeast, including many of the Choctaw. It provided…

The history of public higher education for African Americans in Florida provides an excellent opportunity to examine American institutional and political dynamics. Following World War II, Florida public higher education expanded dramatically, while at the same time, state leaders maintained racial segregation well after "Brown v. Board of…

World War II stands as a defining moment for American higher education. During the crisis of international relations that existed by the late 1930s, American thinkers of various stripes felt compelled to mobilize the country's intellectual and educational resources in defense of democracy, thus creating "a great ideological revival of democracy…

In this article, the author makes two alternative arguments about long-term trends in the history of American colleges and universities. The initial argument is that over the years professional education has gradually subverted liberal education. The counterpoint is that, over the same period of time, liberal education has gradually subverted…

Case method teaching was first introduced into American higher education in 1870 by Christopher C. Langdell (1826-1906) of Harvard Law School (HLS), where it became closely associated with a complex of academic meritocratic reforms. "Mr. Langdell's method" became, in fact, emblematic, "creating and embodying cultural values and…

The author introduces William Barton Rogers, conceptual founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who pursued two interrelated careers in nineteenth-century America: one centered on his activities in science and the other on his higher educational reform efforts. This essay explores one theme in Rogers' scientific and educational…

In 1979, fourteen years after publishing his landmark work, "The Emergence of the American University," Laurence R. Veysey wrote a forward-looking article for the "American Quarterly" titled "The Autonomy of American History Reconsidered." In his article, Veysey suggested that the time had come to rewrite American…

In this paper, the author examines the content of Laurence Veysey's subsequent scholarship--centered upon his career-long fascination with the "price structure" of American society and institutions. Veysey's first scholarly volume after The Emergence of the American University was Law and Resistance: American Attitudes toward Authority (1970).…

Laurence R. Veysey's The Emergence of the American University--one of the densely textured, lucidly written, always thoughtful accounts of the history of higher education?has been largely superseded, especially after the 1980s, in part by histories that unlike Veysey's, maintain close attention to religion, both during the period that he focused…

Discusses five key factors historians should consider when writing history. The factors address the selection, construction, distribution, transmission, and legitimation of knowledge. Illustrates the importance of these factors with examples from a writing project about women. (RKM)