Tag: History

  • Nation & World

    Redressing five centuries of injustice: A start

    On May 4, 1493 — less than a year after Columbus set foot in the New World — Pope Alexander VI issued “Inter Caetera,” a papal bull that still resonates more than five centuries later.

  • Campus & Community

    Sen. Edward Kennedy to receive honorary degree at December convocation

    Sen. Edward Kennedy will receive an honorary degree from Harvard on Dec. 1 in a special convocation at Sanders Theatre. The honor is in recognition of Kennedy’s lifelong commitment to public service and his tireless efforts as a champion for a range of social issues including health care, civil rights, labor, employment, the environment, and…

  • Arts & Culture

    Puzzling through Yeats with Helen Vendler

    Helen Vendler knows a thing or two about William Butler Yeats. She has authored three books on the Irish poet’s work, including her most recent volume, “Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form,” published in 2007.

  • Nation & World

    Obama joins list of seven presidents with Harvard degrees

    When sworn in on Jan. 20, Barack Obama will join current President George W. Bush (M.B.A. ’75) and Presidents John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy as Harvard graduates chosen to serve as the nation’s chief executive.

  • Campus & Community

    This month in Harvard history

    Nov. 14, 1899 — In Sanders Theatre, students, faculty, and administrators celebrate Maj. Henry Lee Higginson’s recent $150,000 gift for building the Harvard Union (now part of Barker Center for the Humanities).

  • Campus & Community

    And into the night

    It was well after midnight, and America was more than an hour into the Obama era when 02138 erupted in a series of spontaneous, ravelike street parties. In Harvard Yard, revelers dressed up the sedate, seated bronze John Harvard in a cloud of red, white, and blue balloons, and propped on his still chest an…

  • Campus & Community

    At the Harvard Kennedy School

    The interest in this contest on the Harvard campus was apparent early at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. Their election night gathering, featuring returns showing on the forum’s large screen, was ticketed for the first time. Forum officials said that 1,500 applied for the 1,000 tickets available.

  • Campus & Community

    A special night at the Queen’s Head pub

    At 7 p.m., with election results still the stuff of dreams, Matthew Clair pitched in to inflate balloons at the Cambridge Queen’s Head at Loker Commons. The Dunster House senior, whose Brentwood, Tenn., family, he said, was the only one in town with an Obama sign on the front lawn, is president of the Harvard…

  • Campus & Community

    At Harvard Law School, and beyond

    One hundred and twenty seven years later, the Harvard Law School can claim it has another alumnus in the White House. On Nov. 4, Barack Obama became the second Law School grad to ascend to the nation’s highest office.

  • Campus & Community

    This month in Harvard history

    Oct. 26, 1952 — Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson worships at the First Parish Church in Harvard Square and visits President James Bryant Conant afterwards in Massachusetts Hall.

  • Nation & World

    Nunn wants to eliminate nukes

    Sam Nunn, former Democratic senator from Georgia (1973-97), is well known as an eminence in the realm of U.S. security policy.

  • Campus & Community

    This month in Harvard history

    Oct. 15, 1945 — Pulitzer Prize-winning History Professor Paul Herman Buck, PhD ’35, becomes Harvard’s first Provost. Under the terms of the statutory amendment approved on this day by the Board of Overseers, the Provost is also, ex officio, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (the position Buck has held since 1942).

  • Campus & Community

    Center for European Studies welcomes its fall fellows

    The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) has announced the arrival of its 2008 fall fellows. The CES is dedicated to fostering the study of European history, politics, and society at Harvard, and selects visiting scholars that will play an active role in the intellectual life of the CES and the University. While…

  • Health

    Reading human history in the bones of animals

    In a Siberian cave Patrick Wrinn found bones: bones of sheep and goats, bones of extinct bison and horses, of mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses. Wrinn, a doctoral student in archaeology at the University of Arizona and member of the Harvard Class of 1998, is trying to find out who — or what — put the…

  • Campus & Community

    This month in Harvard history

    October 1784 — Harvard awards an honorary Doctor of Laws degree to Maj. Gen. Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette.

  • Arts & Culture

    Dracula, Romanian revolution onstage at A.R.T.

    Thirteen men and women stand in a semicircle. Several of them are wearing hammer and sickle-shaped headdresses. Some are carrying wrenches; others, flowers. They are all singing the refrain “Drac-u-laaa.” And in the center of it all, there is a man, slowly turning, pretending to draw a cape to the tip of his nose.

  • Arts & Culture

    Davis explains how he makes his operas swing

    A former Harvard professor returned to campus last week to explain how he makes opera swing. Anthony Davis, a composer known for his diverse approach to music, incorporating diverse elements like jazz, improvisation, minimalism, and the Javanese gamelan (an Indonesian musical ensemble that includes gongs, xylophones, and bamboo flutes) into his work, recently discussed his…

  • Arts & Culture

    Power of the pen in early America

    In 1747, three members of the Abenaki Native American tribe and their Mohawk ally posted a petition on a wall of an English fort in the Connecticut River Valley. The paper was small, but it spoke volumes.

  • Campus & Community

    This month in Harvard history

    Oct. 14, 1763 — At the College library in Old Harvard Hall, Ephraim Briggs, Class of 1764, checks out “The Christian Warfare Against the Deuill World and Flesh” by John Downame, one of several hundred books that John Harvard had bequeathed to the College in 1638.

  • Campus & Community

    Program allows gifted scholars to kick back and … work

    Abena Dove Osseo-Asare studies African medicinal plants, including their fate at the hands of modern science and global patent systems.

  • Arts & Culture

    Key statistical ideas celebrate birthdays

    University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen M. Stigler, a frequent visitor to Harvard, has a favorite movie — “Magic Town,” a black-and-white flick from 1947. It stars James Stewart as a pollster who discovers a magical place: a heartland town whose citizens have a range of opinions that are a near-perfect composite of the whole…

  • Nation & World

    History of human rights declaration is reviewed at CGIS

    In September 1948, representatives of 18 nations at the newly minted United Nations were inspired by the tumult and horror of World War II to create a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

  • Campus & Community

    This month in Harvard history

    Oct. 17, 1640 — The Great and General Court grants Harvard the revenues of the Boston-Charlestown ferry, which plies the shortest route between Boston and Charlestown, Cambridge, Watertown, Medford, and the plantations of Middlesex County. (From Charlestown, travelers could head for Connecticut.)

  • Campus & Community

    And quiet flows the Don at Pusey

    The Harvard Map Collection presents its fall exhibition, “From the Amazon to the Volga: The Cartographic Representation of Rivers,” which opened Wednesday (Sept. 24). For centuries, cartographers have wrestled with the difficulties of depicting rivers, and in the process they have devised many ingenious ways of answering the challenge — from streambed profiles to bird’s-eye…

  • Campus & Community

    Ken Burns to headline Theodore Roosevelt celebration

    Theodore Roosevelt is considered a principal architect of the U.S. national park system. To help mark his 150th birthday this fall, noted filmmaker Ken Burns will come to Harvard to offer remarks and show clips from his upcoming documentary, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” due out in fall 2009. Scheduled for Oct. 3 at…

  • Arts & Culture

    Radcliffe Fellow Markovits talks about ‘mad, bad, dangerous’ poet

    George Gordon, Lord Byron died in 1824 at the age of 36 — a short life, but long enough for Byron to become a personage so vivid and controversial that he was arguably the modern era’s first celebrity.

  • Campus & Community

    Ackerman awarded Golden Lion for contributions to architecture

    The 2008 Venice Biennale award committee has conferred on James S. Ackerman, the Arthur Kingsley Professor of Fine Arts Emeritus at Harvard University, its prestigious Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. The award citation praised Ackerman’s contributions to architecture, calling him “the doyen of the international community of historians of Renaissance architecture,” adding, “He is one…

  • Campus & Community

    Praise and preservation

    Harvard University President Drew Faust used the bully pulpit of Appleton Chapel this week (Sept. 16), urging the University’s citizens to act responsibly on environmental matters.

  • Nation & World

    U.S. v. Microsoft, 10 years later

    At the time, some considered it the trial of the century. The weight of the U.S. government pitted against one of the most influential companies in the world accused of abusing its power and crushing the competition.

  • Campus & Community

    This month in Harvard history

    Sept. 1, 1922 — The Divinity School and the Andover Theological Seminary formally begin a closer affiliation under a new agreement approved in the spring.