In doing a little web research into a photo caption this evening, I stumbled across a great site documenting the history of King’s College in New York City. (King’s College went on to be renamed Columbia University, and was the fifth chartered school in the British Colonies.)

The site is not that unique a find — there are plenty of other websites that go into a good deal of the history of colonial higher education — but discovering it comes at a great time for me, since I’m reading City of Dreams. It’s a neat novel about five or six generations of a family of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries as they wind their way through eighteenth-century life in what’s now New York City, and the amount of historical detail Beverly Swerling goes into (all factually correct, as far as I can tell) is amazing. I’m finding it hard to not keep grabbing my Encyclopedia of New York City to find out more about places and people mentioned in the novel, and I am loving forming mental images of the island of Manhattan in the 1700s. There’s also a good deal of medical history in the novel, which obviously isn’t diminishing my interest.

Both of these works — the website about the history of King’s College, and City of Dreams — are worth checking out.