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Harvard Students, the Boston Elite, and the New England Preparatory System, 1800–1876

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Ronald Story
Ronald Story*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Massachusetts
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Extract

The Harvard College student body, like the university as a whole, changed markedly in the ante-bellum era, but it changed less in size than in composition. Though the number of yearly graduates remained stable at about 60 from 1810 to 1850, the students came increasingly from Boston's “rich and fashionable families.” More precisely, they came from the new business and professional families who provided the funds for Harvard's rapid growth and came by degrees to control its governing bodies. The Harvard “experience” became an important part of the process of elite social, economic, and cultural consolidation in these years, and contributed to the cohesiveness, cultivation, and hauteur of the distinctive Brahmin upper class that was to flourish after the Civil War. Analysis of the way in which Harvard came to be monopolized by the Boston elite should throw light not only on the development of the class but also on the evolving educational network which formed a portion of its institutional underpinnings.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , Fall 1975 , pp. 281 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 by New York University 

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References

Notes

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