The San Francisco longshoreman-philosopher, Eric Hoffer, once wrote that, “The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.” While Hoffer had something else in mind, I will use this epigram as an introduction to, and commentary upon, the fact that a large part of the universe of historical actors has been treated to a malign neglect. When Tamara Hareven refers to “anonymous Americans,” she does not equate the “anonymous” in American social historiography with the “inarticulate”; neither does she define a projected integrated and comprehensive history of social experience as “history from the bottom up”. Rather, she points out that all manners of peoples and ranges of human experience have escaped, or been excluded from, systematic historical inquiry. As an essential element in “raising consciousness,” in asserting their identity, numerous groups are now trying to “get their hands on history.”

In the late eighteenth century are to be found the first beginnings of the to us so familiar division in American higher education between public and private institutions. Throughout most of the eighteenth century such distinction was unknown. Higher education and the preparatory Latin grammar schooling were viewed as intimately linked to the interests of state and church. This view applied to the three colleges existing in the first quarter of the century. Harvard, William and Mary, and Yale served as training centers for their provinces' political and professional leadership. They had been duly authorized and in part financially supported by their colonial legislatures. With the exception of Yale they were under the joint supervision and government of representatives of the colony's lay population and established church. These governmental arrangements reflected the Reformation concept of the unity of established secular and ecclesiastical government with the college, a concept which in turn rested on the assumed religious homogeneity of the province's population, Anglican in Virginia and Puritan in New England. It was precisely this assumption of a religiously homogeneous population which could no longer be upheld in the eighteenth century. As it was being swept away by the appearance of Baptists and Quakers, Lutherans and Dutch Reformed as well as by the migration of Puritans and Anglicans into all the colonies, it could no longer provide guidelines for college founding and governance. As a consequence in colonies with existing colleges—Massachusetts, Virginia, and Connecticut—traditions of college governance came under fire, and the weakening alliance of state and church forced the colleges to redefine their own position. In colonies without an established church there emerged during the Great Awakening of the 1740s a more particularistic perspective on college education as serving local or group interests and being largely without either financial support or direct governmental control from public authorities. It was under these conditions, also, that the first attacks appeared against the concept of a provincial college as a monopoly. These attacks were beaten back in 1762 in Massachusetts and in 1770 in Rhode Island. But when Queen's College opened in 1766 in New Jersey, a competing college appeared for the first time in one of the colonies, and a new development was inaugurated which, half a century later, would lead to the proliferation of the “private” colleges of the antebellum era.

The Harvard College student body, like the university as a whole, changed markedly in the ante-bellum era, but it changed less in size than in composition. Though the number of yearly graduates remained stable at about 60 from 1810 to 1850, the students came increasingly from Boston's “rich and fashionable families.” More precisely, they came from the new business and professional families who provided the funds for Harvard's rapid growth and came by degrees to control its governing bodies. The Harvard “experience” became an important part of the process of elite social, economic, and cultural consolidation in these years, and contributed to the cohesiveness, cultivation, and hauteur of the distinctive Brahmin upper class that was to flourish after the Civil War. Analysis of the way in which Harvard came to be monopolized by the Boston elite should throw light not only on the development of the class but also on the evolving educational network which formed a portion of its institutional underpinnings.

Historians of the nineteenth-century Muslim Mediterranean often experience difficulties when they attempt to integrate the study of social or administrative institutions within larger political or intellectual topics. An example of this phenomenon can be found in the history of the Khedivial Law School in Cairo, founded in 1873 and eventually attached to Fuad I University after World War I. The presence of a large number of lawyers within the first twentieth-century Egyptian nationalist movement and in the political life of Egypt up to the end of the constitutional monarchy in 1952 is a well-known fact. As a result, many authors have mentioned the Khedivial Law School, and have tended to give it an historical importance which separates—perhaps in an exaggerated fashion—the study of European law from other professions pursued by young educated Egyptians at the turn of the century, such as that of medicine or military science. When certain recent scholars analyse the components of Egyptian nationalist politics after 1907, therefore, they offer an image of the law school which goes beyond the general idea we actually possess of its internal development between the reigns of Khedive Ismail (1863–79) and Khedive Abbas I (1892–1914). Fortunately an examination of the European archives and the Arabic press of the period helps fill the most obvious gaps in the historical record. It also allows us to estimate the degree to which we can realistically suggest a connection between the teaching of European law and the emergence of a particularly Egyptian model of nationalist political expression in the twentieth-century Mediterranean Arab World.