Education

Alabama's superintendent of education is appointed by the state board of education, whose members are elected. The superintendent is in charge of the state department of education.

Alabama's public school system was established in 1854. The first compulsory school attendance law was enacted in 1915. The present law requires attendance from age 7 to 16.

The University of Alabama was chartered in 1820 and opened in 1831 at Tuscaloosa. Only four buildings survived the Civil War. The university now includes the original campus at Tuscaloosa and branches at Birmingham and Huntsville.

Auburn University is a land-grant school founded as East Alabama Male College in 1856 and renamed Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College when taken over by the state in 1872. The name was changed to Alabama Polytechnic Institute in 1899, and to its present form in 1960. The main campus is at Auburn; there is a branch at Montgomery.

Interesting facts about Alabama
The first electric trolley streetcars in the United States began operating in Montgomery in 1866.
Little River, on Lookout Mountain in northeastern Alabama, is the only river in the United States that runs its entire course on the top of a mountain. It forms the Little River Canyon. Known as the "Grand Canyon of the South," it is the deepest gorge east of the Mississippi River.
A monument to the boll weevil, erected in 1919, stands in the town of Enterprise. After the insect destroyed their cotton crops, Alabama farmers were forced to grow new and more diverse crops. As a result, the farmers became more prosperous. Enterprise then put up the monument "in profound appreciation of the boll weevil and what it has done as the herald of prosperity ... ."
George Washington Carver gained a reputation as one of the world's greatest agricultural scientists from the research he conducted at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). Among his discoveries were more than 300 new uses for peanuts and more than 100 new uses for sweet potatoes.
The black civil rights movement began at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery in 1955. The church's minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., organized a nonviolent protest group to help carry out a boycott against the Montgomery bus system. This action came after a black passenger, Rosa Parks, was arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white person.