28 August
Iowa’s first General Assembly established the State University of Iowa in 1847. Classes, however, did not begin until 1855, the year Amos Dean (1803-1868) was selected to be its first chancellor.
Dean was born and raised in Barnard, Vermont. He graduated with honors from Union College in Schenectady, New York, in 1826 and practiced law in Albany, New York, after his admission to the state bar in 1829. In 1833 he organized the Young Men’s Association of Albany for the purpose of mutual benefit and education, believed to be the first organization of its type in the United States.
That same year, he began work on a massive seven-volume, History of Civilization, which took him thirty years to complete (1833-1863). Largely self-taught, Dean was influenced by the physiographic determinism of William Robertson’s History of America (1777). Persuaded by the idea that civilization could flourish only in temperate zones, Dean ignored Asian societies or others from frigid or tropical climates presumed to inhibit civilizing influences. Beginning with the ancient societies of Egypt and the Near East, Dean traced the rise of civilization through Greece and Rome to the modern nations of Western Europe. Each society passed through the organic cycle of birth, maturity, and decay; and each contributed essential features to modern civilization. His principle theme, and the ultimate measure of the progress of civilization, was the process of individualization.
An early advocate of professional training, Dean founded, or helped to found, law and medical programs in Albany over a 15-year period, beginning in 1838. He was teaching in the Albany law schools when appointed chancellor and professor of history at the State University of Iowa in 1855. Because the university was organized before there were students to be taught beyond the preparatory and normal departments, there was no demand for Amos Dean’s history course as described in the first catalog. Dean came to Iowa City during three summers to appoint a faculty and organize the curriculum. But, according to his biography in the prefaced to the first volume of his History of Civilization, Dean “felt too old to break up a long-continued life in the east, and commence anew in the growing west.” So, he resigned his position at Iowa in 1859.
Writes Stow Persons: “Given Dean’s views on the teaching of history it was unfortunate that no students were privileged to benefit from his instruction. He complained of the current narrow emphasis on war and politics. Too little attention was being pad to the forces that lie at the foundation of human progress, namely, the moral and intellectual influences that shape behavior. Attention should be focused on industrial development, religious beliefs, law and jurisprudence, manners and customs, philosophy and art. The study of history would thus be brought within the empire of cause and effect and become a true social science.”
Following Dean’s departure, the teaching of history at Iowa would be overseen principally by the classics faculty until 1887, when William R. Perkins became the first professionally trained historian hired and History assumed a more prominent place in the curriculum.
See Persons, History at Iowa, The First Century, for more detail on Early History at UIowa.
Amos Dean, The History of Civilization, Vol 1 (of 7). (Albany, NY: Joel Munsell, 1868)
Vol 2
Vol 3
Vol 4
Vol 5
Vol 6
Vol 7
Guide to the Amos Dean Papers, UIowa Special Collections
J.L. Pickard, “Historical Sketch of the State University of Iowa,” Annals of Iowa (April 1899).1-30
J.L. Pickard, “Historical Sketch of the State University of Iowa,” Annals of Iowa (April 1899).30-50
J.L. Pickard, “Historical Sketch of the State University of Iowa,” Annals of Iowa (April 1899).51-66