The Forging of an Aristocracy

Harvard College was founded and governed for almost two centuries by the state-church establishment in Massachusetts. The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800-1870, by Ronald Story, is a thorough and extremely interesting analysis of how, between 1800 and 1870, Harvard gradually became a privately endowed institution supported and governed by upper-class Boston. For the forging of a viable society with a coherent culture, they were far less so. Harvard continued to prosper under state control in the nineteenth century so long as the Federalists, the party of the rich and well-born in Boston and elsewhere in the state, dominated all branches of the state government. Ronald Story shows how the privatization of Harvard turned it into an elite institution in which the socializing function became as important as teaching and research.