The University of North Alabama (abbreviated UNA) is a coeducational university located in Florence, Alabama, and the state's oldest four-year public university.
Occupying a 130-acre (0.5 km2) campus in a residential section of Florence, UNA is located within a four-city area that also includes Tuscumbia, Sheffield and Muscle Shoals. The four cities comprise a metropolitan area with a combined population of 140,000 people.
The University of North Alabama, which celebrated its 175th anniversary in 2005, has undergone numerous sweeping changes in the course of its long history. Originally founded as LaGrange College in 1830, it was reestablished in 1872 as the first state-supported teachers college south of the Ohio River. A year later, it became one of the nation's first coeducational colleges.
Within the last half century, the University of North Alabama has developed into a comprehensive regional university exerting a major influence over the cultural, social and economic life of Northwest Alabama and providing educational opportunities for students pursuing undergraduate and graduate majors offered through the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, Education and Nursing and Health.
UNA administrators also have expressed a strong commitment to improving academic quality, an effort perhaps reflected in the 2008 edition of U.S. News and World Report’s America’s Best Colleges, which ranked the university as a top tier public university.
UNA also underwent continued growth in 2009, with 7,243 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled for the fall semester.
Read more about University Of North Alabama: History, Campus, Academic Programs, Media, Athletics, Greek Life, Traditions, UNA Gallery, UNA People
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“The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is in the nature of allegory, as opposed to symbolism, to beg the question of absolute reality. The allegorist avails himself of a formal correspondence between “ideas” and “things,” both of which he assumes as given; he need not inquire whether either sphere is “real” or whether, in the final analysis, reality consists in their interaction.”
—Charles, Jr. Feidelson, U.S. educator, critic. Symbolism and American Literature, ch. 1, University of Chicago Press (1953)
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—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
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I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee.”
—Stephen Collins Foster (1826–1864)