This month in Harvard history

February 1943 — Animator Walt Disney visits Harvard to consult with Anthropology Department Chair Earnest A. Hooton about a forthcoming Technicolor film ridiculing Adolf Hitler’s racist theories. On the steps of the Faculty Club, Disney tells the Boston press that he plans to leave Hitler “out of the picture,” since “too much attention has already been given to that guy.”

Disney also inspects the Harvard Film Service, views a series of Harvard reading films, and admires the glass flowers.

Feb. 22, 1945 — At the Fogg Museum, the Harvard University Committee on Inter-American Relations hosts a reception for Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, who had conducted the Boston Symphony in a Sanders Theatre concert devoted entirely to his music on Feb. 21.

February 1949 — As a gesture of sympathetic distress over a Jan. 26 fire that destroys 11 of 12 great murals in the Gondo (Golden Hall) of Horyu-ji Monastery at Nara, Japan, the Fogg Museum dedicates its Courtyard to a display of the only full-scale reproductions of the murals in the West. The originals had been housed in what the Fogg describes as “the oldest wooden building still standing in the world,” in constant use for Buddhist devotions since its foundation in 607.