On the night of November 11, 1817, nineteen-year-old Rufus Choate rushed to Dartmouth Hall from his Hanover boarding room to answer a call of alarm from his classmates. Professors from Dartmouth University, an institution recently created by legislative action, “had violently attacked” the student library under Choate's care “and, after an unsuccessful attempt to force the lock, literally hewed down the door” with an axe. Choate, who rejected these professors as figures of authority, joined his peers to temporarily lock the intruders in an adjoining room while they removed their books. News of the incident enraged the already volatile debate about the future of Dartmouth. Because the library riot involved generational violence, the professors accused the students of immaturity in an effort to exclude them from the Dartmouth debate. But students found that claims of immaturity could cut both ways. Although students occupied a liminal position between dependence and independence, it was not despite their youth, but because of it that they influenced the outcome of the case. The library riot, then, is important not only for understanding the social context of the Dartmouth case, but also the ways young men interpreted the meaning of youth and maturity in the Early Republic.

Christine Ladd-Franklin spent the first forty years of her life becoming one of the best-educated women in nineteenth-century America. She spent the rest of her life devising fellowship programs designed to enable educated women to have the same opportunities as men in their academic careers. “What law of nature is it,” Ladd-Franklin wondered in 1890, “that says that it is fitting for women to be the teachers of young persons of both sexes in preparatory schools, but that it is not fitting that they should teach young persons in college?” This supposed “law” hurt not only women who were qualified to be professors, like the scientist and mathematician Ladd-Franklin, but also the larger number of college-educated American women who turned to teaching in primary and secondary schools after graduation. As Ladd-Franklin explained, the difficulty women had in becoming professors had a profound effect on women who taught at lower levels. Because women were “thought to be not worthy of being college professors,” it was “impossible for them to receive equal pay with men in the secondary schools.” The solution to the problem of inequality in schools and colleges, Ladd-Franklin believed, lay in proving that individual women could perform as well as men; this “entering wedge” would prop open the door for future women. But as Ladd-Franklin's life and work show, there were limits to a strategy that focused on individuals in institutions.

During the period between 1870 and 1920, the gross national product of the United States increased more than sixfold, as revolutions in transportation, communications, and manufacturing sparked growth in the economy. Large industrial corporations emerged, and their growing power presented grave challenges for social policy, while their wealth enriched an unprecedented number of millionaires and multi-millionaires, whose contributions prompted an enormous increase in philanthropy across the nation. In particular, Andrew Carnegie sold his steel companies for $480,000,000 in 1901 and founded the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1902, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1905, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911. Even more prominent, oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, “the most famous American of his day,” devoted $447,000,000 to endowing the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research in 1901, the General Education Board in 1903, the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial in 1918.

In the early 1970s the first large cohorts of Chicano PhD scholars entered academia, often hired into faculty positions at newly created Chicano departments or centers. These Chicano scholars came after earlier pioneer Mexican-American historians such as Carlos Castañeda and George I. Sanchez at the University of Texas, Austin; Julian Samora of the University of Notre Dame; and Carlos Cortes of the University of California, Riverside. Instead, they came of age during the fluorescence of the Chicano movimiento of the 1960s and 1970s. The academic identities of the first Chicano PhD scholars were firmly grounded in Chicanismo, a term which emphasizes ethnic nationalism, political and economic equity, and cultural and community pride.