Defining Moments
- 1787 – Founding of the Pittsburgh Academy
- 1810 – Founding of the student literary society, the Thespians, to be followed by the Philomathean Literary Society, the Irving Society, and the Franklin Society.
- 1819 – Founding of the Western University of Pennsylvania
Selected from a long list of notable students
1787
- Morgan Neville, author of “The Last of the Boatmen”
1819
- Wilkins Tannehill, author of Sketches of the History of Literature from the Earliest Period to the Revival of Letters in the Fifteenth Century
...
For this section and the next (1819), we relied heavily on Agnes Lynch Starrett, Through One Hundred and Fifty Years: The University of Pittsburgh (U of Pittsburgh Press, 1937).
For a full account of Morgan Neville’s career, see John T. Flanagan, “Morgan Neville: Early Western Chronicler,” The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, Volume 21, Number 4, December 1938, 255-266.