Word: betas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first Phi Beta Kappa Society came into existence December 5, 1776 at William and Mary in Virginia. It introduced all the ritual and mysticism employed by contemporary fraternities--an oath of secrecy, a badge, mottoes in Greek and Latin, a code of laws, an elaborate form of initiation, a seal, and a special hand-clasp...
Meetings, however, were devoted to debates and the reading of papers instead of to boisterous intake of alcohol. In that respect Phi Beta Kappa at its inception distinguished itself from the run of fraternities...
Harvard got its charter five days before another charter was voted to Yale. The Yale Phi Beta Kappa, however, was an active organization ten months before the Harvard branch organized. Which of the two chapters is the older is still a meet question...
...hocus pocus of Phi Beta Kappa meetings began to fade away in the 1830's largely as a result the work of the Harvard chapter's Edward Everett, Joseph Story, and John Quincy Adams. The Harvard chapter's change in policy probably saved Phi Beta Kappa from becoming nothing more than the oldest collegiate social organization in the United States...
...Beta Kappa's metamorphosis to an honor society came at no particular time--it just gradually "happened" in the middle eighteen hundreds. The society of scholars settled down to an annual routine of meeting for election and initiation of new members, holding exercises in June at which scholarly orations and poems are read, and having annual dinners...