Introduction

This chapter examines the early years of the relatively young institutions of American architecture education, while others focus on geographic dimensions and the influences of European and more broadly Western traditions on American architecture culture, but also vice versa. Geographically speaking, while this collection does not touch on all of the many different regions that make up the United States, case studies of architecture schools in Alabama, California, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, and Washington, DC, represent a good number of them. While the shameless, legal discrimination against women and ethnic minorities preventing access to education during the time of many of the case studies herein is now gone, so too is government funding for the so-called "public education" that largely benefitted white males during the same decades.