early_colleges: Early colleges in the United States
In historydata: Data Sets for Historians

Description Usage Format Variables Author(s) References Examples

This dataset contains information about the founding of colleges established before 1848 in the United States of America.

1	early_colleges

A data frame with 65 observations of 6 variables.

college: The name of the college or university.
original_name: The name under which the institution was founded, if different.
city, state: The location of the institution.
established: The year that the institution was founded.
sponsorship: The sponsoring religious denomination, or secular if not founded by a denomination.

George Oberle, George Mason University

Daniel Walker Howe

This data was transcribed by George Oberle from the table "Some American Institutions of Higher Education Founded Before 1848, in Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 460-461.

head(early_colleges)
if(require(ggplot2)) {
  ggplot(early_colleges, aes(x = established)) + geom_bar(binwidth = 5) +
  ggtitle("Founding Dates of Early American Colleges")
}

                 college         original_name         city state established
1                Harvard                  <NA>    Cambridge    MA        1636
2       William and Mary                  <NA> Williamsburg    VA        1693
3                   Yale                  <NA>    New Haven    CT        1701
4 Pennsylvania, Univ. of                  <NA> Philadelphia    PA        1740
5              Princeton College of New Jersey    Princeton    NJ        1746
6               Columbia        King's College     New York    NY        1754
                           sponsorship
1 Congregational; after 1805 Unitarian
2                             Anglican
3                       Congregational
4                    Nondenominational
5                         Presbyterian
6                             Anglican
Loading required package: ggplot2
Warning message:
Ignoring unknown parameters: binwidth