This month in Harvard history

May 5, 1960 — Fine Arts Associate Professor Seymour Slive begins a visit to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Moscow, and Odessa as the first participant in a faculty exchange program between Harvard and the State University of Leningrad. Slive spends most of the month studying the celebrated collections of The Hermitage in Leningrad and lectures at the famous museum on 17th-century Dutch painting.

May 1963 — Harvard and Radcliffe students take part in a Boston Common rally supporting civil-rights activities in the South.

May 1, 1963 — A farewell dinner for retiring Lowell House Master Elliott Perkins brings the unveiling of an oil portrait of Perkins by Walter Stuempfig. In a humorous touch, the unveiling initially reveals a reproduction of Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” covering the real portrait.

May 13, 1963 — At the invitation of fellow Overseer John F. Kennedy ’40, President of the United States, the Harvard Board of Overseers holds its annual dinner at the White House. While in Washington, the Overseers also hold two days of meetings at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Collection and Library (May 13), and at the nearby, recently completed Center for Hellenic Studies (May 14).

May 1964 — The cornerstone of the Countway Library of Medicine is laid.

May 7, 1964 — A crowd of some 1,500, including many undergraduates, gathers beneath the sycamores along the Charles chanting, “We shall not be underpassed,” thus protesting plans of the Metropolitan District Commission for a Memorial Drive underpass that would destroy most of the venerable trees and, many fear, seriously compromise the quality of life in Cambridge.