Brown: The History of an Idea

An eloquent illustrated history of one of America's greatest universities

Founded in 1636, essentially as a refuge for outcasts from Massachusetts, the colony of Rhode Island was unusually open-minded, leading Massachusetts Puritan Cotton Mather to refer to it as “the latrina [or sewer] of New England.” The sixth of the Ivy League universities to be founded, in 1764, Brown accepted students early on regardless of religious affiliation, and in 1969 adopted a student-proposed “New Curriculum,”...