December 3 · This Day in America
In a clearing in the Ohio wilderness, twenty-nine men and fifteen women sit down for the first day of classes at the Oberlin Collegiate Institute. No college in America has ever taught women and men in the same rooms toward the same degrees. Two years later Oberlin goes further, voting — by a single ballot — to admit students "irrespective of color," the first college in the nation to make it policy. The vision is plain and radical: that the life of the mind is not the property of one sex or one race. The first women earn bachelor's degrees here in 1841. The decision is made on a frontier, by people with almost no money, who simply could not find a good reason to keep anyone out. America's idea of who gets to learn changes in a log building, on purpose.
Source: www.oberlin.edu
Also on this day · 1818
Congress admits Illinois to the Union with a population of roughly 35,000, most of its tallgrass prairie still unbroken and untouched by the plow. The new state stretches its northern line far enough up Lake Michigan to capture a swampy portage town that will, within a lifetime, become Chicago. A handful of settlers on an empty prairie vote themselves into the American experiment, and the map grows a little more itself.
Source: www.loc.gov