Visit our new topic page about Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition | Date: 2008

Johns Hopkins University mainly at Baltimore, Md. Johns Hopkins in 1867 had a group of his associates incorporated as the trustees of a university and a hospital, endowing each with $3.5 million. Daniel C. Gilman became the first president in 1875, modeled the new school after European universities rather than American colleges, and emphasized graduate research rather than collegiate instruction. When it opened in 1876, Johns Hopkins was considered an experiment, but it was an immediate success. It was extremely influential, and the organizers of such schools as Clark Univ. and the Univ. of Chicago took many of their ideas from the plan of Johns Hopkins. The first American university press was opened at Johns Hopkins in 1878. In 1889, Johns Hopkins Hospital was completed, and in 1893 the famous medical school opened.

Today the university includes undergraduate and graduate schools of arts and sciences and schools of engineering, music, medicine, nursing, public health, and continuing studies. The School of Advanced International Studies, at Washington, D.C., has foreign study centers at Bologna, Italy, and Nanjing, China. Research facilities include the Space Telescope Science Institute, used for NASA's Space Telescope Project; the Pew Undergraduate Physics Research Laboratory; and the Chesapeake Bay Institute for oceanographic research at Annapolis, Md. Johns Hopkins has a noted library system that houses a number of important manuscript collections and documents.

Bibliography: See history by J. C. French (1946).



Author not available, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY., The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition 2008

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright 2008 Columbia University Press