History
The university was founded in 1849 and opened its doors in 1853 as Michigan State Normal School. Michigan State Normal School was the first in Michigan and the first normal school created outside the original 13 colonies. One hundred and twenty-two students started classes March 29, 1853. Adonijah Welch served as Michigan State Normal School's first principal. Michigan created a state educational system modeled on that of Germany. The normal schools were to train teachers for common schools, which were being established rapidly in new towns in the state. In 1899, the school became the Michigan State Normal College when it created the first four-year curriculum for a normal college in the nation. Normal began the 20th century as Michigan's premier teacher-preparatory school and had become the first teacher-training school in the United States to have a four-year degree program. Just like many other universities during World War I, the Great Depression and World War II, the school survived and expanded further. With the additions of departments and the large educational enrollment after WWII, the school became Eastern Michigan College in 1956.
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Read more about this topic: Eastern Michigan University Famous quotes containing the word history:“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.” “What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.” “In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.” | |