The idea of establishing new schools for the promotion of socialist ideas in the United States emerged at the end of the 19th Century, when a group of Christian socialists organized as the Social Reform Union established the College of Social Science — a correspondence school — in the city of Boston in 1899. Another similarly short-lived institution called the "Karl Marx School" was established in that same city at around that same time. Neither managed to leave much of a mark upon the historical record.