Dartmouth College ( ) is a private, coeducational university located in Hanover, New Hampshire, U.S. Incorporated as "Trustees of Dartmouth College," it is a member of the Ivy League and one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution. In addition to its undergraduate liberal arts program, Dartmouth has medical, engineering, and business schools, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences. With a total enrollment of 5,849, Dartmouth is the smallest school in the Ivy League.

Established in 1769 by Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock with funds largely raised by the efforts of Native American preacher Samson Occom, the College's initial mission was to acculturate and Christianize the Native Americans in the area. After a long period of financial and political struggles, Dartmouth emerged from relative obscurity in the early twentieth century. In 2004, Booz Allen Hamilton selected Dartmouth College as a model of institutional endurance "whose record of endurance has had implications and benefits for all American organizations, both academic and commercial," citing Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward and Dartmouth's successful self-reinvention in the late 1800s. Dartmouth alumni, from Daniel Webster to the many donors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have been famously involved in their college.

Dartmouth is located on a rural 269-acre (1.1 km²) campus in the Upper Valley region of New Hampshire. Given the College's isolated location, participation in athletics and the school's Greek system is high. Dartmouth's 34 varsity sports teams compete in the Ivy League conference of the NCAA Division I. Students are also well-known for preserving a variety of strong campus traditions.

History

Dartmouth was founded by Eleazar Wheelock, a Puritan minister from Connecticut, who sought to establish a school to train Native Americans as ministers to spread Anglo-American cultural precepts, particularly Protestant Christianity. Wheelock's ostensible inspiration for such an establishment largely resulted from his relationship with Mohegan Indian Samson Occom. Occom became an ordained minister after studying under Wheelock's tutelage from 1743 to 1747 and later moved to Long Island to preach to the Montauks.

Wheelock instituted Moor's Indian Charity School in 1755. The Charity School proved somewhat successful, but additional funding was necessary to continue school's operations. To this end, Wheelock sought the help of friends to raise money. Occom, accompanied by Reverend Nathaniel Whitaker, traveled to England in 1766 to raise money in the dissenting churches of that nation. With the funds, they established a trust to help Wheelock.