Preface

When the College of William and Mary began to plan the observance of its three hundredth anniversary, one of the earliest recommendations of the Tercentenary Commission, the body charged with oversight of the entire celebration, was that there should be a new history of the institution. While there were a number of accounts that treated limited aspects of the first two centuries in the life of the College, no comprehensive history existed. In particular, the years from the end of World War I to the present, the period in which the modern institution took form, had never been systematically examined.

A subcommittee on tercentenary publications undertook the task of exploring how such a history might be prepared. Its members worked with the provost, Melvyn D. Schiavelli, whose support for the undertaking proved indispensable. From the outset the commission and officials of the College made it clear that the work would receive generous funding and that any author or authors would have a free hand to write an objective history without restraint. Those commitments have remained firm throughout the preparation of the history.

Even with those two endemic problems of many commemorative and institutional histories eliminated, the task was still formidable. Finding a single author able to commit the necessary time to complete a volume covering such a span of time and embracing so many periods of American history proved especially difficult. The best solution seemed to be a collaborative work with several authors, each assuming responsibility for a major period in the history of the College.

The five of us who agreed to undertake the history recognized that such an approach posed difficulties of its own, especially the potential loss of some of the unity and coherence that a volume by a single author might more easily achieve. Yet, we also concluded, as we discussed how we might best divide responsibility for various segments of the overall study, that the history of William and Mary does in many respects divide into several distinct periods. More often than not, these periods are defined by the social and economic effects of some of the major wars in which Americans have engaged, from the American Revolution to World War Il. While we hope that we have provided adequate transitions between the various sections and made it possible to read the work as a sustained narrative, we have nonetheless concluded that we ought to make clear, as we have done in the table of contents and the section headings, the division of the history into several such parts and the specific responsibilities of each author.

We began this undertaking with a sense that the character of histories of colleges and universities falls somewhere along a line from celebratory, anecdotal, even sentimental accounts of a beloved alma mater to scholarly, more objective examinations of the institution. Since we are all academically trained historians, almost inevitably our work tends in the latter direction. We believe, moreover, that it is important to understand the almost unceasing struggle of the College for survival in its first two centuries and, after permanence was essentially assured, the succession of efforts to define and redefine its purposes and character. We hope that those who will help set its direction as the fourth century begins will find this perspective on the history of William and Mary helpful.

We also have endeavored to give the story some interest, especially for alumni, who will no doubt constitute the largest readership for the volumes. And we hope we have written with some fondness for an institution with which all of us have had a close association.

Finally, it is probably fair to say that although we believed that we had an adequate appreciation of the task that lay before us, we almost certainly underestimated its difficulty. The College has had a long and unusually complex history. There are gaps in the sources, even for the more heavily documented years of the twentieth century. Even so, containing the length of the work while still producing a comprehensive history proved a great problem. We take some satisfaction in the fact that the College now has a systematic account of the full sweep of its history and hope that it may deepen our understanding of William and Mary’s past.