Light on the Hill

In 1795 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill became the first state university in the United States to open its doors to students. As the celebrated institution prepared to observe its bicentennial, William Snider provided a rich chronicle of its history.

Snider describes the signal events of the university’s first two hundred years: the chartering and siting of a charming campus and village; the trying years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, during which the University closed its doors; the period of remarkable renewal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the achievement of national and international stature in the 1920s and 1930s; the challenging 1960s; and the period of expansion and innovation in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Throughout, Snider provides fine portraits of individuals prominent in the life of the university, from William R. Davie and Joseph Caldwell to Harry Woodburn Chase, Frank Porter Graham, and William C. Friday. His book evokes for all who have been part of the Chapel Hill community memories of their own associations with the campus and a sense of the greater history of the institution of which they were a part.

William D. Snider, retired editor of the Greensboro News and Record, is author of Helms and Hunt: The North Carolina Senate Race, 1984. He is a 1941 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.