ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the circumstances under which G. Stanley Hall gained his first professorship, at Johns Hopkins University. It begins with a discussion of the history of Maryland and Baltimore, contrasting it with the histories of New York and Boston. Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876, was the first school in the US to focus on graduate study and scientific research. Its president, Daniel Coit Gilman, hired as philosophy instructors Hall and two more senior men: Charles S. Peirce and George S. Morris. Hall quickly became a national figure in the subject of modern education, and won the professorship. Competing with the more accomplished scientists of Johns Hopkins, Hall soon founded the first psychology research laboratory in the US, as well as the discipline’s first periodical, the American Journal of Psychology. The school soon began to have financial difficulties, which were compounded by Baltimore’s sometimes-violent labor strife. When Hall was offered the presidency of a new university, Clark, he jumped at the opportunity. Hall followed the novel John Hopkins model and quickly assembled a faculty of first-rate scientists and scholars, many lured from Europe. Unfortunately, Hall’s university soon fell on hard times.
