An essential history of the modern research university When universities began in the Middle Ages, Pope Gregory IX described them as "wisdom's special workshop." He could not have foreseen how far these institutions would travel and develop. Tracing the eight-hundred-year evolution of the elite research university from its roots in medieval Europe to its remarkable incarnation today, Wisdom's Workshop places this durable institution in sweeping historical perspective. In particular, James Axtell focuses on the ways that the best American universities took on Continental influences, developing into the finest expressions of the modern university and enviable models for kindred institutions worldwide. Despite hand-wringing reports to the contrary, the venerable university continues to renew itself, becoming ever more indispensable to society in the United States and beyond. Born in Europe, the university did not mature in America until the late nineteenth century. Once its heirs proliferated from coast to coast, their national role expanded greatly during World War II and the Cold War. Axtell links the legacies of European universities and Tudor-Stuart Oxbridge to nine colonial and hundreds of pre-Civil War colleges, and delves into how U.S. universities were shaped by Americans who studied in German universities and adapted their discoveries to domestic conditions and goals. The graduate school, the PhD, and the research imperative became and remain the hallmarks of the American university system and higher education institutions around the globe. A rich exploration of the historical lineage of today's research universities, Wisdom's Workshop explains the reasons for their ascendancy in America and their continued international preeminence.

This volume comprises a new collection of essays--four previously unpublished--by James Axtell, author of the acclaimed The European and the Indian and The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, and the foremost contemporary authority on Indian-European relations in Colonial North America. Arguing that moral judgements have a legitimate place in the writing of history, Axtell scrutinizes the actions of various European invaders--missionaries, traders, soldiers, and ordinary settlers--in the sixteenth century. Focusing on the interactions of Spanish, French, and English colonists with American Indians over the eastern half of the United States, he examines what the history of colonial America might have looked like had the New World truly been a "virgin land," devoid of Indians.

When universities began in the Middle Ages, Pope Gregory IX described them as "wisdom's special workshop." He could not have foreseen how far these institutions would travel and develop. Tracing the eight-hundred-year evolution of the elite research university from its roots in medieval Europe to its remarkable incarnation today, Wisdom's Workshop places this durable institution in sweeping historical perspective. In particular, James Axtell focuses on the ways that the best American universities took on Continental influences, developing into the finest expressions of the modern university and enviable models for kindred institutions worldwide. Despite hand-wringing reports to the contrary, the venerable university continues to renew itself, becoming ever more indispensable to society in the United States and beyond. Born in Europe, the university did not mature in America until the late nineteenth century. Once its heirs proliferated from coast to coast, their national role expanded greatly during World War II and the Cold War. Axtell links the legacies of European universities and Tudor-Stuart Oxbridge to nine colonial and hundreds of pre-Civil War colleges, and delves into how U.S. universities were shaped by Americans who studied in German universities and adapted their discoveries to domestic conditions and goals. The graduate school, the PhD, and the research imperative became and remain the hallmarks of the American university system and higher education institutions around the globe. A rich exploration of the historical lineage of today's research universities, Wisdom's Workshop explains the reasons for their ascendancy in America and their continued international preeminence.

Deals with the encounters of Europeans and Indians in colonial North America. A blending of history and anthropology, the author draws on a wide variety of sources, including archaeological findings, linguistics, accounts of colonists, art, and published scholarship.

In this provocative and timely collection of essays--five published for the first time--one of the most important ethnohistorians writing today, James Axtell, explores the key role of imagination both in our perception of strangers and in the writing of history. Coinciding with the 500th anniversary of Columbus's "discovery" of America, this collection covers a wide range of topics dealing with American history. Three essays view the invasion of North America from the perspective of the Indians, whose land it was. The very first meetings, he finds, were nearly always peaceful. Other essays describe native encounters with colonial traders--creating "the first consumer revolution"--and Jesuit missionaries in Canada and Mexico. Despite the tragedy of many of the encounters, Axtell also finds that there was much humor in Indian-European negotiations over peace, sex, and war. In the final section he conducts searching analyses of how college textbooks treat the initial century of American history, how America's human face changed from all brown in 1492 to predominantly white and black by 1792, and how we handled moral questions during the Quincentenary. He concludes with an extensive review of the Quincentenary scholarship--books, films, TV, and museum exhibits--and suggestions for how we can assimilate what we have learned.

The Princeton Graduate School was born of controversy, first between President James McCosh and his opponents, who doubted the wisdom of attaching a graduate school to a small college with a religious complexion, and then between President Woodrow Wilson and the formidable Dean Andrew Fleming West. Dean West, who won every point at issue between them, went on to establish a graduate school that has increasingly been identified with excellence in all the fields in which it offers training. Succeeding deans, notably Hugh Stott Taylor, shaped Princeton's particular approach to graduate study with its central focus on research. Especially through the professors trained in the graduate school, Princeton has profoundly influenced education at many colleges and universities nationwide. Outside the academy, Princeton graduate alumni have been leaders in the arts, religion, industry, and government here and abroad, carrying with them a deep commitment to learning fostered by their time in the shadow of Cleveland Tower. The history of the Graduate School at Princeton thus reveals a great deal about the explosion of knowledge that has radically changed American society in the twentieth century.

First published in 1978, "The Princeton Graduate School: A History" has been revised and expanded, with new chapters recounting the dramatic growth of graduate education since World War II. The updated edition celebrates the centennial of the Graduate School's founding and looks forward to its continued importance in the twenty-first century.

In this concise but sweeping study, James Axtell depicts the complete range of transformations in southeastern Indian cultures as a result of contact, and often conflict, with European explorers and settlers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Stressing the dynamism and constant change in native cultures while showing no loss of Indian identity, Axtell effectively argues that the colonial Southeast cannot be fully understood without paying particular attention to its native inhabitants before their large-scale removal in the 1830s.

Axtell begins by treating the irruption in native life of several Spanish entradas in the sixteenth century, most notably and destructively Hernando de Soto's, and the rapid decline of the great Mississippian societies in their wake. He then relates the rise and fall of the Franciscan missions in Florida to the aggressive advent of English settlement in Virginia and the Carolinas in the seventeenth century. Finally, he traces the largely symbiotic relations among the South Carolina English, the Louisiana French, and their native trading partners in the eighteenth-century deerskin business, and the growing dependence of the Indians on their white neighbors for necessities as well as conveniences and luxuries.

Focusing on the primary context of interaction between natives and newcomers in each century -- warfare, missions, and trade -- and drawing upon a wide range of ethnohistorical sources, including written, oral, archaeological, linguistic, and artistic ones, Axtell gives a rich sense of the variety and complexity of Indian-white interactions and a clear interpretative matrix by which to assimilate the details.

Based on the fifty-eighth series of Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures, The Indians' New South is a colorful, accessible account of the clash of cultures in the colonial Southeast. It will prove essential and entertaining reading for all students of Native America and the South.

The School Upon a Hill is the first attempt to portray a view of education that, in the author s words, enables us to see the educational process if not actually through children s eyes at least from their position in a Lilliputian universe. Its subject is socialization: the ways in which children in colonial New England were educated for life in society whether it was the family, the church, or the larger community and what they were taught that transformed them from cultureless newborns into functioning, obedient, and cooperative members of a distinctive society and culture."