The UIHistories Project

Welcome to the UIHistories Project! The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a rich legacy, stretching back almost 150 years. On these pages you can trace the history of how the University of Illinois was founded on the "treeless prairie", and how the face of campus has changed as the University grew from a single building to the multicampus institution of today. Read about the founding years of the University, early milestones and student life of yesteryear, the histories of nearly 300 buildings, major class gifts, or simply spend some time reading through the more than 70,000 pages of digitized maps, course catalogs, building dedications, and booklets from the past century and a half. Glance at the top of every page and see a cross-section of campus as it stands today (click any image to learn more about it). Whatever you're looking for, you are likely to find something of interest on these pages!

This site and its contents were created as a student project and neither the site nor its contents are an official University of Illinois publication on University history and are not managed or produced by any University unit. The University Illinois Archives holds the official primary source documents on the University's history, from which this project was compiled.

New! Today in the History of the University of Illinois. See what happened at the University on this date in history.

Featured: Take a moment and check out the UIHistories Photo Archive (formerly UIPhotos / Phantasm).

• Foreword
• Foundation
• Buildings
• Gifts/Memorials
• Collections
• Student Life
• Milestones
• Postword
• Other Resources
• Special Collections
• About This Site
• Digital Library
• Photo Archives
• Virtual Tour