Emory University history

Not until two years after the chartering would the College open its doors, and on September 17, 1838, the College's first president, Ignatius Alphonso Few, and three other faculty members welcomed fifteen freshmen and sophomores.

In 1854, the Atlanta Medical College, a forerunner of Emory University School of Medicine, was founded.

On April 12, 1861, the American Civil War began.

When Emory reopened in January 1866, three faculty members (including President James Thomas) returned to a campus whose buildings had been used for military hospitals and whose libraries and equipment had been destroyed.

Hopkins became the first president of the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1888.

Emory University's first international student, Yun Chi-ho, graduated in 1893.

On August 16, 1906, the Wesley Memorial Hospital and Training School for Nurses, later renamed the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, was established.

In 1914, following a protracted struggle between the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust and the bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, over control of the university, the church severed its long relationship with Vanderbilt and made plans to create a new university in the Southeast.

In 1915, Emory College relocated to Druid Hills and was rechartered as Emory University after accepting a land grant from Asa Griggs Candler, founder of The Coca-Cola Company.

The Emory University School of Law was established in 1916.

On April 6, 1917, the United States entered the First World War.

Within a year marble buildings were under construction out in the Druid Hills, and within four years-by September 1919-Emory College had joined the schools of theology, law, medicine, business, and graduate studies at the University's muddy new campus.

Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who graduated from the Candler School of Theology in 1940 and is portrayed in John Hersey's Hiroshima, was able to organize the Hiroshima Maidens reconstructive surgery program based on the associations he made while studying in the United States.

The university awarded its first Ph.D. in 1948.

Formerly an all-male school, Emory officially became a coeducational institution in 1953.

A keen competitiveness developed between the two societies, leading to a tradition of debate that permeated the campus, and laying the groundwork for Emory's national preeminence in debate-a tradition carried forward since 1955 in the Barkley Forum.

In 1959, sororities first appeared on campus.

Marvin S. Arrington Sr. was Emory University's first, full-time African American student and graduated from Emory University School of Law in 1967.

In 1971, Emory established one of the nation's first African-American studies programs and the first of its kind in the Southeastern United States.

The course of Emory's history changed dramatically in November 1979 when Robert Winship Woodruff and George Waldo Woodruff presented the institution with a gift of $105 million in Coca-Cola stock.

She received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2000.

Since September 2003 the University has undertaken to refine its vision for its future and to develop a strategic plan for how to get there.

In 2005, the university presented the President Medal, a rare award conferred only on individuals whose impact on the world has enhanced the dominion of peace or has enlarged the range of cultural achievement, to Civil Rights Movement activist Rosa Parks.

Carson also penned a sequel, Red Doc> (2013), in which Heracles and Geryon—renamed Sad and G, respectively—wander a series of mythologically inflected landscapes.

In 2015, Emory University School of Law received a $1.5 million donation to help establish a John Lewis Chair in Civil Rights and Social Justice.

The City of Atlanta annexed Emory's campus effective January 1, 2018, a part of its largest annexation within a period of 65 years; the Atlanta City Council voted to do so the prior December.

The work was first staged in 2019.

Gregory L. Fenves, formerly the president of the University of Texas at Austin, became Emory University's twenty-first president in August 2020.