In 1867, Johns Hopkins University was established as a definite post-graduate school, granting the doctorate. It was the first such establishment in the United States and President Gilman secured a distinguished faculty including such foreign scholars as Paul Haupt in Semitic Languages and Maurice Bloomfield in Indo-Iranian. Other outstanding men were soon appointed and the ideals of German scholarship were solidly established. Undergraduate work at Hopkins was regarded as merely an incidental in the first years of the institution’s life. The example of Johns Hopkins was not directly followed but it exerted a marked influence upon some of the more important of the older institutions. Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Princeton and a few others began to offer more advanced instruction and step by step the modern American graduate school, with its special course of study, was evolved. This process required some decades and each institution approached the problem in its own way, integrating the new work in accordance with its own traditions. As these developing universities broadened their interests and the range of their activities, it was only natural that sooner or later they would come to take into consideration the study of the Slavic peoples and their culture, especially of Russia.[25] The first step was taken at Harvard under the influence of Archibald Cary Coolidge.[26] In a very real sense, Coolidge was typical of the men whom we have considered in the preceding chapter. He was born in Massachusetts in 1866 and graduated from Harvard in 1887. He then went to the University of Freiburg for his doctorate, receiving it in 1892. During these five years, however, he took time out from his actual attendance at courses to serve as Acting Secretary of the United States Legation in St. Petersburg in 1890–1891 and to act, in 1892, as private secretary to his uncle, then United States Minister to France. He returned to the United States in 1893 and took a position in the Department of History at Harvard. The next year he introduced a course on the history of northeastern Europe. This was, in other words, a course in Russian and Polish history. It was the first time anyone had offered a course covering Russia which did not view her history solely in terms of contacts with the West, the Eastern Question, the fate of the Ottoman Empire and the relations of Russia with the countries of Western Europe. Professor Coolidge was an enthusiast and was deeply convinced of an American need to study the Slavic World. He expounded these views in a paper delivered before the American Historical Association in 1895. By the next year he had added a course at Harvard on the Eastern Question. At about the same time he secured the appointment of Leo Wiener as Professor of Russian Literature. This marked the actual beginning of Slavic studies in an American university.