This month in Harvard history

April 28-30, 1959 — In Sanders Theatre, Puerto Rican Governor Luis Muñoz Marín delivers three Godkin Lectures on the general topic of “Nationalism and Its Effect on World Tensions.” The lectures are also broadcast by WGBH-TV.

April 21, 1960 — In Sanders Theatre, playwright Lillian Hellman delivers the annual Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture, describing “how a play comes to be written and how it makes its way to the stage.” (Quotation: “Harvard Alumni Bulletin,” May 7, 1960)

April 1962 — On the ground floor of Dunster St. on the Mount Auburn side of Holyoke Center, the Harvard Information Center opens, with a Harvard University Press display room on the mezzanine.

April 1963 — Students at the Colleges and at the Law, Divinity, and Business schools join forces to raise $2,000 to help the financially strapped Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) continue its voter-registration efforts among the blacks of Greenwood, Miss.

April and May 1964 — To honor the 400th birth anniversaries of playwrights William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, the Loeb Drama Center mounts a Marlowe-Shakespeare Quadricentennial Festival featuring concert readings of four Marlowe plays and productions of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and “King Lear.” English Assistant Professor and Loeb Acting Director Daniel Seltzer directs “Julius Caesar” and plays the title role in “Lear.”

April 1965 — The Michael Clark Rockefeller Memorial Fellowships are established by the Rockefeller family and Michael’s friends. Son of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mary Clark Rockefeller, Michael (a member of the Class of 1960) died in November 1961 while studying the natives of Papua New Guinea.

April 1965 — Five hundred Harvard and Radcliffe students journey to Washington, D.C., to join some 15,000 students who picket the White House in protest of the Vietnam War and present a petition to Congress.

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