[19][20] The university was founded as the Medical College of Louisiana[1] in 1834 partly as a response to the fears of smallpox, yellow fever, and cholera in the United States.

The first president chosen for the new university was Francis Lister Hawks, an Episcopal priest and prominent citizen of New Orleans at the time.

Paul Tulane, owner of a prospering dry goods and clothing business, donated extensive real estate within New Orleans for the support of education.

[24] Paul Tulane's endowment to the school specified that the institution could only admit white students, and Louisiana law passed in 1884 reiterated this condition.

In the same year, the university moved to its present-day uptown campus on historic St. Charles Avenue, five miles (8 km) by streetcar from downtown New Orleans.

The Middle American Research Institute was established in 1925 at Tulane "for the purpose of advanced research into the history (both Indian and colonial), archaeology, tropical botany (both economic and medical), the natural resources and products, of the countries facing New Orleans across the waters to the south; to gather, index and disseminate data thereupon; and to aid in the upbuilding of the best commercial and friendly relations between these Trans-Caribbean peoples and the United States.

On April 23, 1975, US President Gerald Ford spoke at Tulane University's Fogelman Arena at the invitation of F. Edward Hebert, the US representative of Louisiana's 1st Congressional District.

[25] In 1990, Rhonda Goode-Douglas, alongside other black, female students, founded the first African American sorority in Tulane's history, AKA Omicron Psi.

The donations came from James H. Clark, a member of the university's board of trustees and founder of Netscape, and David Filo, a graduate of its School of Engineering and co-founder of Yahoo!.

A fund-raising campaign called "Promise & Distinction" raised $730.6 million by October 3, 2008, increasing the university's total endowment to more than $1.1 billion; by March 2009, Yvette Jones, Tulane's Chief Operating Officer, told Tulane's Staff Advisory Council that the endowment "has lost close to 37%", affected by the Great Recession.

[33] As a result of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and its damaging effects on New Orleans, most of the university was closed for the second time in its history—the first being during the Civil War.

[35] In May 2006, graduation ceremonies included commencement speakers former Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who commended the students for their desire to return to Tulane and serve New Orleans in its renewal.

The Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life (LBC) was renovated to be a green, environmentally friendly building and opened for student use in January 2007.

In late November 2008 the City of New Orleans announced plans to add bicycle lanes to the St. Charles Avenue corridor that runs in front of campus.

[41] In 2019, a new student space located in the middle of the uptown campus, The Malkin Sacks Commons, was opened by President Mike Fitts.

[44] There were previously two other complexes:[44] The Tulane University Health Sciences campus is located in the downtown New Orleans Central Business District between the Mercedes-Benz Superdome and Canal Street in 18 mid/high-rise buildings, which house the School of Medicine, the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and the main campus of the Tulane Medical Center.

[50] Tulane offers an executive MBA program in Cali, Colombia; Santiago, Chile; Shanghai, China; and Taipei, Taiwan.

In 2007 Tulane made a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10%, getting students involved by providing an Energy Smart Shopping Guide and electronics "greening" services from IT.

Newcomb-Tulane College serves as an administrative center for all aspects of undergraduate life at Tulane, while individual schools direct specific courses of study.

The School of Liberal Arts encompasses 16 departments and 19 interdisciplinary programs in the social sciences, humanities, and fine and performing arts—including 50 undergraduate majors and two dozen M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. programs—plus the Shakespeare Festival, Summer Lyric Theatre, Carroll Gallery, Tulane Marching Band, and the Middle America Research Institute.

[66] In the following year John Leonard Riddell invented the first practical microscope to allow binocular viewing through a single objective lens.

Per the Renewal Plan instituted after Hurricane Katrina, Tulane requires all freshmen and sophomores to live on campus, except those who are from surrounding neighborhoods in New Orleans.

Just before leaving the SEC, it had notably become the first conference school to field a black athlete when Stephen Martin, who was on an academic scholarship, played on the baseball team in the 1966 season.

The university has committed to upgrading its athletic facilities in recent years, extensively renovating Turchin Stadium (baseball) in 2008, Fogelman Arena (now Devlin Fieldhouse; basketball and volleyball) in 2006 and 2012,[110] and Goldring Tennis Center in 2008.

For example, from television: Jerry Springer and Ian Terry, from literature: John Kennedy Toole, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Confederacy of Dunces, Shirley Ann Grau, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, and conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart, who later criticized his education at Tulane for what he perceived as its inadequacy;[112] from business: David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!, Ashley Biden, daughter of Jill Biden and Joseph R. Biden and Neil Bush, economist and brother of President George W. Bush; from entertainment: Lauren Hutton, film actor and supermodel, and Paul Michael Glaser, TV actor of "Starsky and Hutch"; from fine arts: Sergio Rossetti Morosini, artist and conservator, and internationally renowned glass artist Mitchell Gaudet; from music: conductor and composer Odaline de la Martinez, who was the first woman to conduct at a BBC Proms concert in London; from government: Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House who famously coordinated the first Congressional Republican majority in 40 years, Perry Chen, founder of Kickstarter and Luther Terry, former U.S.

[113] Tulane also hosted several prominent faculty, such as two members who each won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Louis J. Ignarro and Andrew V. Schally.

Other notables such as Rudolph Matas, "father of vascular surgery" and George E. Burch, inventor of the phlebomanometer in medicine, also were on faculty at Tulane.

[116][117][118] Several football alumni played in the National Football League, including five-time NFL Champion Wide Receiver Max McGee, Mewelde Moore, Matt Forté, Troy Kropog, Dezman Moses, Cairo Santos (Chicago Bears), Darnell Mooney (Chicago Bears), and Super Bowl champion Shaun King (Tampa Bay).

Several baseball alumni played in the Major Leagues, including Brian Bogusevic (Chicago Cubs), Brandon Gomes (Tampa Bay Rays), Mark Hamilton (free agent), Aaron Loup (Toronto Blue Jays), Tommy Manzella (Colorado Rockies), Micah Owings (Washington Nationals), and J. P. France (Houston Astros).

[119] Several movies have been filmed at the Uptown campus, especially since tax credits from the state of Louisiana began drawing more productions to New Orleans in the early 2000s.