1892 - Education

Education

Newnham College principal and feminist (Anne) Jemima Clough dies at Cambridge February 27 at age 72. British women gain entry to more institutions of higher education, but most colleges continue to limit their enrollment to men; Freemasonry opponent and former Wheaton College president Jonathan Blanchard dies at Wheaton, Illinois, May 14 at age 81, having been succeeded as head of Wheaton by his son Charles Albert, now 42, who will head the school until 1925, increasing enrollment as he pushes its emphasis on Christian fundamentalism.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's graduating class includes MIT's first black graduate. Grandson of a white slaveowner, Wilmington, North Carolina-born student Robert Robinson Taylor, nearly 24, has been helped by a scholarship and studied architecture with a view to helping his father in the building business.

Constantinople's Topkapi Palace Museum opens in the former seraglio (Topkap Saray) of the sultan. The museum will expand its collection of classical antiquities, manuscripts, and archival documents to include ceramics, armor, textiles, and other artifacts.

The University of Chicago opens October 1 with women admitted on the same basis as men. John D. Rockefeller gives another $1.35 million to help get the new school up and running; five major buildings have been completed, and another five will be finished next year.

A "pledge of allegiance" for U.S. schoolchildren to recite October 12 in commemoration of the discovery of America 400 years ago says simply, "I pledge allegiance to my flag, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Socialist and former clergyman Francis Bellamy, 36, has composed the pledge, and it appears in The Youth's Companion at Boston September 8. The family magazine has the largest circulation (about 500,000) of any in America. Businessman Daniel Ford and his nephew James Upham own it, they began a campaign 4 years ago to sell flags to public schools, and about 26,000 schools have bought them (most schools up to now have displayed only state flags). Upham last year hired Bellamy (a first cousin of author Edward Bellamy) to help him in his public-relations effort, "my flag" will be changed in 1924 to "the flag of the United States of America," and generations of schoolchildren will mumble "for Richard Sands" instead of "for which it stands" (see religion, 1943; 1954).