Harcourt Brace College Publishers was the college and higher-education textbook division of Harcourt Brace, founded in 1919 by Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace and one of the major twentieth-century American academic publishing imprints. The Harcourt Brace College list covered composition, rhetoric, literature, history, and the humanities at the university level. Harcourt was acquired by Reed Elsevier in 2001, and most of its college publishing operations were transferred to Thomson Learning (now Cengage Learning) in 2007.