Featured series 
Tag: History
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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.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Feb. 29, 1672 — President Charles Chauncy dies in office. Feb. 10, 1853 — Jared Sparks steps down as President; James Walker, Class of 1814, immediately succeeds him to become Harvard’s 18th President. Feb. 26, 1862 — President Cornelius Conway Felton dies in office. February 1900 — Through the efforts of the Cambridge Cantabrigia Club,…
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Campus & Community
Harvard joins Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies
Harvard University is the most recent member of the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies (NCAIS). The NCAIS, inaugurated in June 2008 by the Newberry Library in Chicago, is composed of 10 research universities that have faculty expertise in the field of American Indian Studies. Harvard was inducted Dec. 1.
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Campus & Community
Manela AAAS visiting scholar
Erez Manela, Harvard’s Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History, is among eight individuals who have been awarded fellowships as part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ (AAAS) Visiting Scholars Program for 2009. The fellowship program supports scholars and practitioners in the early stages of their careers who show leadership potential in the humanities,…
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Nation & World
Religion in the vernacular
In 1215, Pope Innocent III convened the Fourth Council of the Lateran, a religious convocation that laid out to hundreds of bishops, abbots, priors, and Christian patriarchs 70 new decrees. One enjoined the clergy to stop frequenting taverns, engaging in trials by combat, hunting, and practicing what might be called noncelibate habits.
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Campus & Community
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Standing Committees 2008-09
Upon the recommendation of the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), Harvard President Drew Faust has approved and announced the following Standing Committees. Standing Committees of the faculty are constituted to perform a continuing function. Each committee has been established by a vote of the faculty, and can be dissolved only by…
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Campus & Community
College’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter welcomes 48 new members
Forty-eight seniors were recently elected to the Harvard College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (PBK), Alpha Iota of Massachusetts.
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Science & Tech
Researchers study glaciers on Earth’s coldest desert
It’s December, and undergraduate Jenny Middleton bundles up to face the cold. While all across campus, students, and faculty don their winter gear, Middleton is not preparing for the New England winter; she is preparing for an expedition through the Earth’s coldest desert: the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica.
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Campus & Community
Plummer, Noble honored at Memorial Church
It was only last year that a crowded room in Salem, Mass., chuckled as the Rev. Professor Peter J. Gomes of the Memorial Church remarked that the city had erected a statue of “Bewitched” actress Elizabeth Montgomery — an irony as her sole relationship to Salem was her role as a TV witch. Salem’s real…
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Science & Tech
Of Neanderthals and dairy farmers
Harvard Archaeology Professor Noreen Tuross sought to rehabilitate the image of Neanderthals as meat-eating brutes last week, presenting evidence that, though they almost certainly ate red meat, Neanderthal diets also consisted of other foods — like escargot.
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Arts & Culture
Class, war, and discrimination in 1812 Korea
Sun Joo Kim’s laugh is as easy as it is infectious. Her cheery nature no doubt comes in handy when she’s conducting her intensive research in three complex languages.
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Nation & World
Panel looks at ‘the crime of all crimes’
On Dec. 9, 1948, the United Nations adopted a convention that for the first time in history provided a legal definition for genocide. Organized mass murder with the intention of destroying an ethnic or national group, a legacy of World War II, was still a fresh world memory — just as it is fresh today,…