Featured series 
Tag: History
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
June 1913 — Having proved itself during a five-year experimental period, the Business School emerges from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to become an independent graduate school.
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Campus & Community
GSAS awards medal to four for service, scholarship
For 20 years now, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) has awarded its Centennial Medal to a select group of graduates who have made significant contributions to society and scholarship. This year’s recipients: an art historian who encouraged viewers to simply look; a historian who explored the worldwide impact of slavery; an economist…
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Campus & Community
Dean Tosteson dies at age 84
Daniel C. Tosteson, the Caroline Shields Walker Distinguished Professor of Cell Biology, who served an extraordinary two decades as dean of Harvard Medical School, from 1977 to 1997, died peacefully on May 27 after a long illness. He was 84 years old.
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Campus & Community
As the Civil War finally ends, a relieved, sad, graduation day
The Commencement of 1865 and the day of commemoration that followed it hold a unique spot in Harvard history. Though some military actions were still taking place, the Civil War had essentially ended in April of that year. John Langdon Sibley, head librarian at Harvard, wrote in his diary that there had already been a…
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Campus & Community
Ernest May, Harvard professor and eminent historian of international relations, dies at 80
Ernest May, a renowned historian of international relations and foreign policy and professor of history at Harvard University, died on June 1 at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston from complications following surgery, according to his family. He was 80.
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Campus & Community
Groundbreaking professorship in LGBT studies
Harvard has received a $1.5 million gift from the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus (HGLC) to endow the F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality. Harvard Overseer Mitchell L. Adams ’66, M.B.A. ’69, will inform participants at the annual HGLC Commencement dinner that a campaign spanning several years has reached its goal. Named after…
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Campus & Community
O’Connor named Radcliffe Medalist
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has announced that Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, will be awarded the 2009 Radcliffe Institute Medal at the annual Radcliffe Day luncheon on Friday (June 5). Barbara J. Grosz, dean of the Radcliffe Institute, will give opening remarks…
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Campus & Community
Sobering poems, more sobering oration mark PBK
Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) chapter first met in 1781, two years before the end of the Revolutionary War.
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Arts & Culture
Seceding from the secessionists
Deep in Civil War Mississippi, where manicured plantations gave way to wild swampland and thick pine forests, a young white man named Newton Knight led a ragtag band of guerilla fighters against the Confederate Army. His story is one of personal bravery and unwillingness to adhere to the secessionist movement that all but surrounded him.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
May 21, 1940 — “The Harvard Crimson” publishes a statement endorsed by hundreds of students vowing “never under any circumstances to follow the footsteps of the students of 1917” who had gone off to fight in World War I. Thirty-four members of the Class of 1917 defend their actions in a statement published on May…
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Campus & Community
Renowned Lincoln historian David Herbert Donald dies at 88
David Herbert Donald, Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of American Civilization Emeritus, died Sunday (May 17) of heart failure at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He was 88. Donald, a leading historian of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, was born in 1920 in Goodman, Miss., then a segregated town,…
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Arts & Culture
Libraries launch ‘Expeditions and Discoveries’
Harvard’s Open Collections Program has launched “Expeditions and Discoveries: Sponsored Exploration and Scientific Discovery in the Modern Age.” Through the new collection, Internet users can find thousands of maps, photographs, and published materials, along with field notes, letters, and unique manuscript materials on sponsored exploration and related scientific discoveries between 1626 and 1953.
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Arts & Culture
How’d the Russians get the H-bomb?
Ever hear of Elugelab? Until Oct. 31, 1952, it was an island on Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Then it vanished, consumed in the fireball of the world’s first hydrogen bomb.
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Arts & Culture
On the road in the fifth century: Visions of heaven, hell
During the fifth century, travelers began to depart China more frequently than ever before, venturing outward from medieval cities to explore lands in Central and South Asia. A range of individuals eagerly took to the road, writing extensively about their journeys and returning home with elaborate accounts.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
May 26, 1902 — The Harvard Corporation approves the construction of a temporary addition to the south side of Boylston Hall. Completed over the summer and measuring 83 by 33 feet, the add-on consists of a single large laboratory for elementary-chemistry classes and a general-use basement. The addition opens in the fall, with a stucco…
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Arts & Culture
Family of ‘Doc Burr’ donates ‘treasure trove of American cinema’ to HFA
It began as a childhood hobby, but for Howard Burr, collecting films became a lifelong passion. A dentist by trade, Burr amassed a collection that would make most cinephiles envious: nearly 3,000 films, including many rare prints, B films, and vintage Technicolor prints.
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Nation & World
‘Enormous changes’ in thirty years
In Chinese culture, the 60th birthday is an auspicious event. At that age, it is said that a person is at ease.
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Arts & Culture
Oldest living Holocaust survivor speaks at Harvard
Aided by a wheel chair, his slight frame bent in part by a curvature of the spine since birth, in part by the passage of time, a man who endured unspeakable cruelty 70 years ago told his story of survival to a Harvard audience.
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Arts & Culture
Evolution of a sacred text made visible at Houghton
When Jane Cheng ’09 arrived at Harvard four years ago, her interest in book conservation led to a job at the Weissman Preservation Center, and it was that job that led her to the medieval text that would become the subject of both her senior thesis and a new exhibition organized by Cheng at Houghton…
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
April 6-7, 1951 — The Law School holds an Institute for Practicing Lawyers focusing on legal problems of mobilizing for the Korean conflict.
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Campus & Community
Leskov, Zimmerman awarded Hofer Prize for Collecting
Ilya Leskov’s love affair with the city of Paris began with a map. As a child growing up in Moscow, Leskov read the work of writers such as Dumas and Hugo, and often traced the exploits of his literary heroes across a map of the city he’d taped to the back of his front door.…
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Science & Tech
Jefferson Lab Harvard’s newest historic site
The American Physical Society (APS) designated Jefferson Physical Laboratory a historical site in a special ceremony on Monday (April 27).
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Arts & Culture
Locke: More enlightened than we thought
English political philosopher John Locke died nearly a century before the American Revolution, and in his time parliamentary democracy was in its infancy. But his Enlightenment ideas — including the right to life, liberty, and property — went on to inspire American revolutionaries.
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Arts & Culture
Remembering the ‘American War’ of the ’60s
How do nations remember? In part, they remember through monuments — public art designed to capture a national memory and carry it through the ages.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
April 10, 1950 — Ralph J. Bunche — AM ’28, PhD ’34, Director of the United Nations Trusteeship Department, and future winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize — is appointed to a government professorship. He is the first black named to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Bunche expects to do teaching and research…
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Arts & Culture
Human colonization of Australia and the Americas examined
A recent symposium about the prehistory of Australia and the Americas brought together scholars from 10,000 miles apart. But that’s nothing compared to the journey early humans made to populate Australia and the Americas tens of thousands of years ago.
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Health
Lighting the fuse for the Cambrian Explosion
Harvard paleontologists have shed new light on one of the most enduring mysteries of life on Earth: the origins of the creatures that suddenly appear in the fossil record 530 million years ago in an event known as the Cambrian Explosion.
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Arts & Culture
Marking a century since North Pole discovered
The 100th anniversary of the discovery of the North Pole was marked this year on April 6. For more than 20 years, Harvard Foundation Director S. Allen Counter has made it a mission to bring to light the work of Matthew Henson, the African-American Arctic aide of Robert Peary, the sole explorer credited for reaching…
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Arts & Culture
Roughing it on Great Brewster
On the hot day of July 15, 1891, four women set off for the adventure of a lifetime in Boston Harbor. For nearly two weeks the quartet — well-educated, upper-class women from the Lowell area — “roughed it” in a quaint yet ramshackle cottage on remote Great Brewster Island, a place they considered “an enchanted…