University of Kansas

The University of Kansas (KU) is a public research university and the largest in the U.S. state of Kansas. KU branch campuses are located in the towns of Lawrence, Wichita, Overland Park, Salina, and Kansas City, Kansas, with the main campus located in Lawrence on Mount Oread, the highest location in Lawrence. Founded March 21, 1865, the university was opened in 1866, under a charter granted by the Kansas State Legislature in 1864 following enabling legislation passed in 1863 under the Kansas State Constitution, adopted two years after the 1861 admission of the former Kansas Territory as the 34th state into the Union following a very famous bloody internal civil war known as "Bleeding Kansas" during the 1850s.

The university's Medical Center and University Hospital are located in Kansas City, Kansas. The Edwards Campus is in Overland Park, Kansas, in the Kansas City metropolitan area. There are also educational and research sites in Parsons and Topeka, and branches of the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita and Salina. The university is one of the 62 members of the Association of American Universities.

Kansas

Kansas ⁱ/ˈkænzəs/ is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name (natively kką:ze) is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south wind", although this was probably not the term's original meaning. Residents of Kansas are called "Kansans". For thousands of years, what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Tribes in the eastern part of the state generally lived in villages along the river valleys. Tribes in the western part of the state were semi-nomadic and hunted large herds of bison. Kansas was first settled by European Americans in the 1830s, but the pace of settlement accelerated in the 1850s, in the midst of political wars over the slavery issue.

When it was officially opened to settlement by the U.S. government in 1854, abolitionist Free-Staters from New England and pro-slavery settlers from neighboring Missouri rushed to the territory to determine whether Kansas would become a free state or a slave state. Thus, the area was a hotbed of violence and chaos in its early days as these forces collided, and was known as Bleeding Kansas. The abolitionists eventually prevailed, and on January 29, 1861, Kansas entered the Union as a free state. After the Civil War, the population of Kansas grew rapidly when waves of immigrants turned the prairie into farmland. Today, Kansas is one of the most productive agricultural states, producing high yields of wheat, corn, sorghum, and soybeans. Kansas is the 15th most extensive and the 34th most populous of the 50 United States.

Lawrence, Kansas

Lawrence is the sixth largest city in the state of Kansas and the county seat of Douglas County. Located in northeastern Kansas, it is approximately 25 miles east of Topeka, and 35 miles west of the Missouri state border. Lawrence is situated along the banks of the Kansas and Wakarusa Rivers. As of the 2010 census, the city's population was 87,643. Lawrence is a college town and is the home to the University of Kansas and Haskell Indian Nations University.

Lawrence was founded by the New England Emigrant Aid Company and was named for Amos Adams Lawrence who offered financial aid and support for the settlement. Lawrence was central to the Bleeding Kansas era and was the site of the Wakarusa War, the sacking of Lawrence, and the Lawrence Massacre.

Lawrence had its beginnings as a center of Kansas politics. However, its economy soon diversified into many industries including agriculture, manufacturing, and ultimately education, beginning with the founding of the University of Kansas in 1866, and later Haskell Indian Nations University in 1884.

University

A university (Latin: universitas, "a whole") is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which grants academic degrees in various subjects and typically provides undergraduate education and postgraduate education. The word "university" is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars."

History

Definition

The original Latin word "universitas" refers in general to "a number of persons associated into one body, a society, company, community, guild, corporation, etc." At the time of the emergence of urban town life and medieval guilds, specialised "associations of students and teachers with collective legal rights usually guaranteed by charters issued by princes, prelates, or the towns in which they were located" came to be denominated by this general term. Like other guilds, they were self-regulating and determined the qualifications of their members.

In modern usage the word has come to mean "An institution of higher education offering tuition in mainly non-vocational subjects and typically having the power to confer degrees," with the earlier emphasis on its corporate organization considered as applying historically to Medieval universities.