LIFE AT MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY -1857 -1864 255 



University of Berlin. My favorite studies at Yale had 

 been history and kindred subjects, but these had been 

 taught mainly from text-books. Lectures were few and 

 dry. Even those of President Woolsey were not inspir- 

 ing; he seemed paralyzed by the system of which he 

 formed a part. But men like Arnould, St. Marc Girardin, 

 and Laboulaye in France, and Lepsius, Bitter, von Rau- 

 mer, and Curtius in Germany, lecturing to large bodies of 

 attentive students on the most interesting and instructive 

 periods of human history, aroused in me a new current of 

 ideas. Gradually I began to ask myself the question : Why 

 not help the beginnings of this system in the United States I 

 I had long felt deeply the shortcomings of our American 

 universities, and had tried hard to devise something better ; 

 yet my ideas as to what could really be done to improve 

 them had been crude and vague. But now, in these great 

 foreign universities, one means of making a reform be- 

 came evident, and this was, first of all, the substitution of 

 lectures for recitations, and the creation of an interest 

 in history by treating it as a living subject having rela- 

 tions to present questions. Upon this I reflected much, 

 and day by day the idea grew upon me. So far as I can 

 remember, there was not at that time a professor of his- 

 tory pure and simple in any American university. There 

 had been courses of historical lectures at a few institutions, 

 but they were, as a rule, spasmodic and perfunctory. How 

 history was taught at Yale is shown in another chapter of 

 these reminiscences. The lectures of President Sparks 

 had evidently trained up no school of historical professors 

 at Harvard. There had been a noted professor at William 

 and Mary College, Virginia, doubtless, in his time, the 

 best historical lecturer in the United States, Dr. William 

 Dew, the notes of whose lectures, as afterward published, 

 were admirable; but he had left no successor. Francis 

 Lieber, at the University of South Carolina, had taught 

 political philosophy with much depth of thought and 

 wealth of historical illustration ; but neither there nor else- 

 where did there exist anything like systematic courses in 



