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Fraternity History
I am doing a public history project about my college's literary societies and had some questions I figured the Greek Chat community could help with.
Literary societies were popular across American colleges during the 19th century. They had generally died out by the turn of the century but those at Erskine College (it's a small college in rural South Carolina) remained popular and active.
After World War 2, however, the societies began to incorporate social and service aspects. By the late 1960s they declared their focus as social, service, and literary. In 1970 they adopted Greek letters, jerseys, and by the mid-1970s they used fraternity language and focused almost entirely on social activities.
A major question I am trying to answer is why they made that shift. My guess it that as Erskine grew in the 1960s they began to incorporate modern ideas from other colleges and the strictly literary societies began to mold to fraternities.
So my question to you all is: when did fraternities become nationally popular? Wikipedia said that they lost popularity in the 1960s and early 1970s because of the counterculture movement and grew in popularity with Animal House and into the 1980s. Do you have any guess what would cause our literary societies to copy fraternities in 1970?
Thank you all so much for your help!
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