MIT and the Civil War
On April 10, 1861, the Massachusetts legislature authorized a charter officially creating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two days later, Confederate forces besieged Fort Sumter in South Carolina, signaling the start of the Civil War. These two events were not merely a coincidence, but “different expressions of the same tectonic forces” acting upon the country, said President Susan Hockfield, crediting the insight to David Mindell, the Frances and David Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing. Hockfield spoke Tuesday evening at the Boston Public Library as part of the Lowell Lecture Series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. During the hourlong lecture, MIT’s current president looked back at the Institute’s founder and first president, William Barton Rogers, whose vision for a “polytechnic” university — and higher education in general — was shaped by the country’s emerging industrialization, its increasingly divided politics, and the barriers of society...