page_title: Bowdoin College
section_title: Bowdoin alumni
hierarchical_section_title: Bowdoin College / Bowdoin alumni
caption_attribution_description: English: Engravings of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1880).
context_page_description: Bowdoin College is a private liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine. At the time Bowdoin was chartered, in 1794, Maine was still a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The college offers 34 majors and 36 minors, as well as several joint engineering programs with Columbia, Caltech, Dartmouth College, and The University of Maine.
  The college was a founding member of its athletic conference, the New England Small College Athletic Conference, and the Colby-Bates-Bowdoin Consortium, an athletic conference and inter-library exchange with Bates and Colby College. Bowdoin has over 30 varsity teams and the school mascot was selected as a polar bear in 1913 to honor Robert Peary, a Bowdoin alumnus who led the first successful expedition to the North Pole. Between the years 1821 and 1921, Bowdoin operated a medical school called the Medical School of Maine.
  The main Bowdoin campus is located near Casco Bay and the Androscoggin River. In addition to its Brunswick campus, Bowdoin also owns a 118-acre coastal studies center on Orr's Island and a 200-acre scientific field station on Kent Island in the Bay of Fundy.
context_section_description: Famous Bowdoin graduates include:
  U.S. Secretary of Treasury, U.S. Representative, & U.S. Senator from Maine William Pitt Fessenden (1824)
  U.S. President Franklin Pierce (1824)
  Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1825)
  Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1825)
  Medical missionary to the Batticotta Seminary Nathan Ward
  Civil War general Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (1852)
  Civil War general Oliver Otis Howard (1850)
  Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Melville Fuller (1853)
  U.S. Speaker of the House Thomas Brackett Reed (1860)
  Civil War general Thomas W. Hyde, medal of honor recipient, author, founder of Bath Iron Works (1861)
  Mayo Clinic co-founder Dr. Augustus Stinchfield (1868)
  Physicist Edwin Hall (1875)
  Freelan Oscar Stanley, inventor of the Stanley Steamer, and builder of the Stanley Hotel (1877)
  Arctic explorer Admiral Robert Peary (1877)
  Gold mine owner, entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist Sir Harry Oakes (1896)
  Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (1916)
  M*A*S*H creator H. Richard Hornberger (1945)
  Co-founder of the Subway sandwich chain Peter Buck (1952)
  U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas R. Pickering (1953)
  U.S. Senator George Mitchell (1954)
  President and Chairman of the Board of L.L. Bean, Leon Gorman (1956)
  U.S. Senator and Secretary of Defense William Cohen (1962)
  American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault (1973)
  San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee (1974)
  Oaktree Capital Management founder and partner Sheldon M. Stone (1974) 
  Senior Managing Director of The Blackstone Group John Studzinski  (1978)
  Olympic gold medalist Joan Benoit Samuelson (1979)
  Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings (1983)
  Investor Stanley Druckenmiller
  Barclays CEO Jes Staley
  Prison Break and Private Practice actor Paul Adelstein
  Civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson (2007)
  Bowdoin graduates have led all three branches of the American federal government, including both houses of Congress. Franklin Pierce (1824) was America's fourteenth President; Melville Weston Fuller (1853) served as Chief Justice of the United States; Thomas Brackett Reed (1860) was twice elected Speaker of the House of Representatives; and Wallace H. White, Jr. (1899) and George J. Mitchell (1954) both served as Majority Leader of the United States Senate.
caption: Bowdoin alumni Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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