Featured series 
Tag: History
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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…
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Campus & Community
Brown honored by Organization of American Historians
For his book “The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery” (Harvard University Press, 2008), Vincent Brown, the Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History, has been selected by the Organization of American Historians (OAH) as the 2009 recipient of the Melre Curti Award. The honor, presented annually, is awarded for the…
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Arts & Culture
The pogrom that transformed 20th century Jewry
On April 8, 1903 — Easter Sunday — a mild disturbance against local Jews rattled Kishinev, a sleepy city on the southwestern border of imperial Russia.
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Arts & Culture
Cinematic reverberations
The writing of culture watcher and critic Louis Menand — Harvard’s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English — has cast a wide net over the years.
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Arts & Culture
Peabody preserves rare daguerreotypes
Thirty-six rare daguerreotype portraits from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology have recently been stabilized and preserved for future generations, in collaboration with the Weissman Preservation Center at Harvard University Library and the Mellon Foundation. Until photo conservators got to work, some daguerreotypes were nearly obscured by the deterioration of glass and other components,…
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Arts & Culture
Geospatial Library relaunched
Following a yearlong process of redesign and testing, the University Library’s Office for Information Systems has relaunched the Harvard Geospatial Library (HGL), the University’s catalog and repository of data for geographic information systems (GIS). The new HGL offers an enhanced user experience through new functionality and a highly intuitive interface.
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Nation & World
Krook looks at how women fare in international political arena
This past Sunday (March 8) was International Women’s Day, now in its 99th year. And March is National Women’s History Month. So what better time for a scholarly look at how women are faring in the political arena? Mona Lena Krook did just that, outlining in a March 4 lecture at Radcliffe Gymnasium her years…
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Campus & Community
President Faust named American Historian Laureate
Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society, has announced that Drew Faust, Harvard’s president and Lincoln Professor of History, will receive the society’s fourth annual American History Book Prize for “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.”
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Science & Tech
Vivid images, stern warnings mark Ice Age ‘rock’ star’s talk
Oohs and ahhs greeted slide after slide as English author and freelance scholar Paul G. Bahn presented “The Shock of the Old: New Discoveries in Ice Age Art” at the Yenching Institute Feb 26.
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Arts & Culture
Mothers in fiction, mothers in fact
In 1930, the French author Colette published the novel “Sido” and bound the first copy with swatches of blue fabric cut from her late mother’s favorite dress.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Ca. February 1963 — In the latest of a long series of skirmishes with Harvard, Cambridge City Councilor Alfred E. Vellucci proposes that the Lampoon Castle be converted into a public restroom.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Feb. 28, 1902 — The Athletic Committee approves the formation of a swimming club.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Feb. 20-March 8, 1901 —French literary critic Gaston Deschamps gives a series of eight Sanders Theatre lectures in French on “Modern French Drama,” sponsored by the Cercle Français (French Club).
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Arts & Culture
Panel of experts addresses Lincoln’s legacy
On Monday (Feb. 9), a team of experts assembled at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (HKS) to examine the history and profound impact of the tall, awkward, self-taught man from rural Kentucky who is credited with bringing about an end to slavery and saving the nation’s cherished founding principle of democratic rule.
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Campus & Community
‘Symbiotic’ Web archive launched
A new Web archive created by faculty, students, and librarians at Harvard brings original research on Leonard Bernstein and his Boston roots to the public for the first time. The material, which went live on the Web on Jan. 23, was collected during undergraduate seminars and over the course of an international Bernstein Festival at…
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Arts & Culture
Du Bois Institute gives Houghton Library Masonic certificate
The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University recently gave a Masonic membership certificate signed by Prince Hall, a minister, abolitionist, and civil rights activist known as the father of Black Freemasonry in the United States, to Houghton Library.
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Arts & Culture
Vivid scrolls from Japan tell timeless stories
For nearly a decade, Melissa McCormick, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, has been absorbed in the study of elaborate works of fiction. The themes she encounters — love, temptation, even family drama — are timeless. The format — narrow horizontal scrolls of mulberry paper, with hand-painted images and columns of calligraphy —…
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Arts & Culture
Houghton to host four major symposia
The year 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Ballets Russes, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the 300th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Johnson — and all four will be celebrated at Houghton Library.