Austin, Texas

Austin (ⁱ/ˈɒstɪn, ˈɔː-/) is the capital of the US state of Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas, Austin is the 11th-most populous city in the United States and the fourth-most populous city in Texas. It is the fastest growing of the largest 50 US cities. Austin is also the second largest state capital in the United States, after Phoenix, Arizona. As of July 1, 2014, Austin had a population of 912,791 (U.S. Census Bureau estimate). The city is the cultural and economic center of the Austin–Round Rock metropolitan area, which had an estimated population of 1,943,299 as of July 1, 2014.

In the 1830s, pioneers began to settle the area in central Austin along the Colorado River. After Republic of Texas Vice President Mirabeau B. Lamar visited the area during a buffalo-hunting expedition between 1837 and 1838, he proposed that the republic's capital, then located in Houston, be relocated to the area situated on the north bank of the Colorado River near the present-day Congress Avenue Bridge. In 1839, the site was officially chosen as the republic's new capital (the republic's seventh and final location) and was incorporated under the name Waterloo. Shortly thereafter, the name was changed to Austin in honor of Stephen F. Austin, the "Father of Texas" and the republic's first secretary of state.

Campus

A campus is traditionally the land on which a college or university and related institutional buildings are situated. A modern campus is a collection of buildings that belong to a given institution, either academic or non-academic. Usually a campus includes libraries, lecture halls, residence halls, student centers or dining halls, and park-like settings.

Etymology

The word derives from a Latin word for "field" and was first used to describe the grounds of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1774. Some other American colleges later adopted the word to describe individual fields at their own institutions, but "campus" did not yet describe the whole university property. A school might have one space called a campus, one called a field, and another called a yard.

History

The tradition of a campus began with the medieval European universities where the students and teachers lived and worked together in a cloistered environment. The notion of the importance of the setting to academic life later migrated to America, and early colonial educational institutions were based on the Scottish and English collegiate system.