Emory University has a long and varied history, growing from a small and struggling college for Southern men to the large, diverse, and well-established top-tier university that it is today. In the 1830s, a small band of Methodists in Newton County founded the new town named Oxford and college called Emory. On December 10, 1836, the Georgia legislature granted a charter to Emory College, named for the Methodist bishop John Emory. Emory College was organized in 1837 and classes began in 1838.

Following a split between Vanderbilt University and the Methodist church, Asa Candler, the founder of The Coca-Cola Company and brother to former Emory President Warren Candler (1875C), helped the church decide that a new university should be built in Atlanta. In 1914, the first unit of the university—the School of Theology—began classes in downtown Atlanta. In 1919, Emory College joined school of theology, law, medicine, business, and graduate studies at the campus in Druid Hills. Over time schools of nursing, dentistry, library science, and public health would join the family, though dentistry and library science were later phased out. In 1990, building on collaborations with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Emory launched its first new school in nearly 50 years, the Rollins School of Public Health.

At present, Emory has three campuses—Druid Hills, Clairmont, and Oxford—in addition to a number of health care sites throughout metro Atlanta.

Emory granted its first doctoral degree in 1948. It opened residential enrollment to female undergraduates in 1953 and welcomed African American students in 1963, after bringing suit against the state of Georgia and winning the right, in the state Supreme Court, to enroll students without regard to race.

A major gift in 1979 from Robert and George Woodruff of $105 million in Coca-Cola stock allowed Emory to dramatically expand and transform its programs. During the 1980s, under the presidency of James Laney and with the support of the Woodruff gift, Emory achieved national prominence as one of the nation's top research institutions. A key marker of this success was the election of Emory into the Association of American Universities (AAU), a select group of leading public and private research universities in the United States and Canada.