In 1948, three years after the Second World War ended, a historian at a small Indiana college proposed an unusual addition to the curriculum: peace.
Not peace as a slogan. Not peace as the absence of a shooting war. Gladdys Muir wanted students to examine why conflict begins, how injustice sustains it, and what ordinary people might learn to do differently. Manchester College said yes.
That decision made North Manchester the birthplace of what Manchester University identifies as the world’s first undergraduate peace-studies program. The achievement sounds inevitable in hindsight. It was anything but.
A historian with an inconvenient question
Muir was trained as a historian and had spent decades teaching before she came to Manchester. Her career began at what is now the University of La Verne, where an archival account of her work traces her path from teaching Latin and Spanish to leading history courses and shaping students’ understanding of the wider world.
Her Church of the Brethren background mattered. The denomination’s peace tradition gave her a moral vocabulary, but Muir’s thinking was never confined to one creed. According to the Brethren Historical Library and Archives, she studied religious and philosophical traditions broadly and prepared a paper on how Brethren colleges might train men and women for peace leadership.
Manchester president Vernon F. Schwalm allowed her to turn the proposal into a program within the history department. In 1948, peace entered the college catalog as a serious course of study.
Peace was not one subject
Muir understood that peace could not fit neatly inside a single academic box. War is political, but it is also economic. Conflict can be international, institutional, neighborhood-sized, or painfully personal. A useful education in peace would therefore need history, philosophy, ethics, religion, and the study of social structures.
The reading list was similarly wide. Archival accounts describe students encountering Greek tragedy, the Bhagavad Gita, Confucius, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and other voices separated by centuries and continents. The purpose was not to give students one approved answer. It was to make them compare ideas, test assumptions, and recognize that conflict has causes—and therefore choices.
That approach remains visible in Manchester’s current description of the field. The university says its program connects interpersonal conflict with larger forms of injustice, including economic disparity, while drawing on many disciplines. Peace, in other words, is not passive. It is analytical work followed by practical work.
A world first in a small Indiana town
There is something wonderfully Hoosier about the scale of the story. The world’s first undergraduate program devoted to peace did not begin in a national capital or an enormous research institution. It began at a small college beside the Eel River, in a town whose population could have fit inside a large city neighborhood.
Manchester’s History and Philosophical Studies department notes that another undergraduate peace-studies major would not appear in the United States for 23 years. Muir was not following an academic trend. She was helping create one.
She directed the program until 1959. Yet her influence was not limited to formal lectures. Manchester remembers weekly teas where students could continue conversations beyond the classroom. The Brethren archives describe newsletters she sent to more than a thousand former students around the world. Her teaching followed people into their vocations, communities, and adult lives.
The woman the field nearly forgot
Pioneers do not always remain at the center of the stories they begin. Later accounts of peace and conflict studies often gave Muir only brief mention, even as the field expanded across universities around the world. A recent scholarly article in Peace & Change asks directly how power shaped that forgetting.
The record survives because institutions kept it: correspondence, teaching materials, college histories, denominational archives, and the memories of students who knew her work firsthand. Those sources do more than restore a name. They remind us that history can shrink a complicated life into a footnote unless someone returns to the evidence.
What North Manchester sent outward
Manchester still teaches peace studies today. Its North Manchester campus at 604 E. College Avenue remains rooted in the Brethren ideals of peace, service, and reconciliation. The program Muir began has outlived its founder, its original catalog, and generations of students.
Her most enduring idea may also be the simplest: peacemaking was not reserved for diplomats or professional negotiators. The archives describe her belief that people in any vocation could become peacemakers. A teacher, business owner, farmer, nurse, parent, mechanic, or neighbor could practice the difficult skills of listening, examining causes, and choosing repair over escalation.
Coffee cannot solve conflict. But a table, a cup, and enough time to hear another person have often been where understanding begins. That is the modest connection Dials sees in Muir’s story: community is built in the repeated act of making room for conversation.
Cover note: The cover is an original modern Dials Journal editorial illustration. It is not a historical photograph, a portrait of Gladdys Muir, or a documented reconstruction of a particular Manchester classroom.
Sources and further reading
- Manchester University: Peace Studies
- Manchester University: History & Philosophical Studies
- Brethren Historical Library and Archives: Gladdys Esther Muir
- University of La Verne Archives: Women of the Archives
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