University of Alabama

The University of Alabama (informally known as Alabama, UA, the Capstone, or Bama) is a public research university in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States. Established in 1820 and opened to students in 1831, the University of Alabama is the oldest and largest of the public universities in Alabama as well as the University of Alabama System. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".

The university offers programs of study in 12 academic divisions leading to bachelor's, master's, education specialist, and doctoral degrees. The only publicly supported law school in the state is at UA. The school was a center of activity during the American Civil War and the civil rights movement. The University of Alabama varsity football program (nicknamed the Crimson Tide), inaugurated in 1892, ranks as one of the ten best in US history. In a 1913 speech, UA president George H. Denny extolled the university as the "capstone of the public school system in the state", thereby establishing the university's current nickname, The Capstone. As of June 2024 UA has produced 65 Goldwater Scholars, 16 Rhodes Scholars, and 16 Truman Scholars.

In 1818, the United States Congress authorized the newly created Alabama Territory to set aside a township for the establishment of a "seminary of learning". When Alabama was admitted to the Union in 1819, a second township was added to the land grant, bringing it to a total of 46,000 acres (186 km²). The General Assembly of Alabama established the seminary on December 18, 1820, named it "The University of the State of Alabama," and created a board of trustees to manage the construction and operation of the university. The site the board chose for the campus was, at the time, outside the city limits of the erstwhile state capital, Tuscaloosa. William Nichols, the architect of the Alabama State Capitol building in Tuscaloosa, was chosen to design the campus. Influenced by Thomas Jefferson's plan at the University of Virginia, the Nichols-designed campus featured a 70-foot (21 m) wide, 70-foot (21 m) high domed Rotunda that served as the library and nucleus of the campus.

The university's charter was presented to the first university president in the nave of Christ Episcopal Church. UA opened its doors to students on April 18, 1831, with Alva Woods as president. An academy-style institution during the antebellum period, the university emphasized the classics and the social and natural sciences. There were around 100 students per year at UA in the 1830s.

As the state and university matured, an active literary culture evolved on campus and in Tuscaloosa. UA had one of the largest libraries in the country on the eve of the Civil War with more than 7,000 volumes. There were several thriving literary societies, including the Erosophic and the Phi Beta Kappa societies, which often had lectures by such distinguished politicians and literary figures as United States Supreme Court justice John Archibald Campbell, novelist William Gilmore Simms, and professor Frederick Barnard. The addresses to those societies reveal a vibrant intellectual culture in Tuscaloosa; they also illustrate the proslavery ideas that were so central to the university and the state.

Discipline and student behavior were major issues at the university almost from the day it opened. Early presidents attempted to enforce strict rules regarding conduct. Students were prohibited from drinking, swearing, making unauthorized visits off-campus, or playing musical instruments for more than an hour at a time. Still, riots and gunfights were not uncommon. To combat the severe discipline problem, president Landon Garland received approval from the legislature in 1860 to transform the university into a military school.

Many of the cadets who graduated from the school served as officers in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. As a consequence of that role, Union troops burned the campus on April 4, 1865, only five days before Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House. Despite a call to arms and defense by the student cadet corps, only four buildings survived the burning: the President's Mansion (1841), Gorgas House (1829), Little Round House (1860), and Old Observatory (1844). The university reopened in 1871 and in 1880 Congress granted the university 40,000 acres (162 km²) of coal land in partial compensation for war damages.

The University of Alabama enrolled female students beginning in 1892. The board of trustees allowed female students largely because of Julia S. Tutwiler, with the conditions that they be over eighteen, and would be allowed to enter the sophomore class after completing their first year at another school and passing an exam. Ten women from Tutwiler's Livingston school enrolled for the 1893 fall semester. By 1897, women were allowed to enroll as freshmen.