This month in Harvard history

“With 26,000 alumni under arms and some 60,000 graduates of her service schools scattered throughout the globe, Harvard has made no small contribution to this the fourteenth war of her long history. Yet the end of the second World War came quietly to the Yard. A few more than 400 civilian students, most of whom still look forward to the draft, were on hand in the closing weeks of a summer session in Arts and Sciences arranged especially for their benefit. An equal number of Naval ROTC men wondered whether the Japanese surrender would delay their assignment to the Pacific. Fifty-eight law students, two field workers in Public Health, three doctoral candidates in Public Administration, 16 registrants in Graduate Design, and 370 prospective doctors of medicine (most of them in uniform) heard the Cambridge and Boston whistles blow, but without indulging in any obvious display of communal emotion. The 309 students enrolled in the summer session of the Graduate School of Education had left Cambridge while Nagasaki still was.”The Faculty, too, were only sparsely represented in Cambridge during most of the summer – for many of them the first break in nearly three years of a continuous and exhausting program of ‘acceleration [Harvard’s year-round wartime schedule].’”

– From the Harvard Historical Calendar, a database compiled by Marvin Hightower