Abstract

This paper concentrates on the development of American higher education between the end of the Civil War and the First World War. It tries to establish a link between the creation of universities and their subsequent development and the emergence of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a cultural field. Furthermore the paper tries to demonstrate that the development of universities was not an independent phenomenon but was used by the Yankee winners of the Civil War as a means to establish the supremacy of their values and impose their conception of national unity on the South but also on newly-arrived immigrants. Finally, it attempts to show that universities were more socially integrated at the end of this period.