Featured series 
Tag: History
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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).
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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.)
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Campus & Community
Visual history of Fine Arts Library covers decades
In preparation for the Fine Arts Library’s relocation in 2009 during the renovation of the Fogg Art Museum, the library presents “‘An Invaluable Partner …’: Eighty Years of the Fine Arts Library.”
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Campus & Community
Du Bois Institute announces new fellows
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, has announced the appointment of 18 new institute fellows for the 2008-09 academic year.
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Arts & Culture
J.J. Audubon the beginner featured in new book
Although the name John James Audubon is synonymous with beautifully detailed, scientifically accurate drawings of birds, many of his early drawings were destroyed by Audubon himself, but an intriguing selection remains in the collections of Harvard’s Houghton Library and the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ).
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Campus & Community
Houghton sets sights on reception
Houghton Library will host an opening reception on Tuesday (Sept. 16) from 5 to 7 p.m. for its major fall exhibition, “To Promote, to Learn, to Teach, to Please: Scientific Images in Early Modern Books.” The exhibition examines how images in early modern European books of science (1500-1750) not only were shaped by the needs…
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Sept. 7, 1775 — The “New-England Chronicle or Essex Gazette” advertises that the Harvard Corporation and Overseers have chosen the Town of Concord as “a proper place for convening the Members of the said public Seminary of Learning” as the Revolution rages in Cambridge. Students are due in Concord by Oct. 4; probably less than…
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Nation & World
Boston Public School teachers go back to class
What do ancient Rome and the reign of Queen Elizabeth I have to do with the development of the United States government? A lot, according to Harvard government professor Daniel Carpenter.
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Campus & Community
Gates documentary series receives $12M in funding
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) recently announced funding in the amount of $12 million for three, new public television documentary series in which Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. will explore the meaning of race, culture, and identity in America. Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard…
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Campus & Community
Intellectual historian Fleming dies at 84
Donald Fleming, an intellectual historian who studied the impact of science on American thought and was a member of the Harvard faculty for more than 40 years, passed away at his Cambridge home on June 16. He was 84.
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Campus & Community
Rescued Russian bells leave Harvard for home
In a succession of brief ceremonies outside Lowell House this week (July 8), Harvard University officially returned to authorities of the Russian Orthodox Church the last of a set of monastery bells saved from a Stalinist-era scrap heap.
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Campus & Community
Herbert Bloch
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 6, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Herbert Bloch, Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, Emeritus, was place upon the records. Bloch did pioneering work on Greek and Roman historians.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
June 1, 1774 — Several parliamentary punishments for the Boston Tea Party (December 1773) take effect, and British troops occupy Boston. “[C]onsidering the present dark aspect of our public Affairs,” the Harvard Corporation votes “that there be no public Commencement this Year.” Ceremonies do not resume until 1781.
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Arts & Culture
Maggie Spivey: Archaeologist, comedian, princess
Walk past Maggie Spivey in the Yard or on the streets of Cambridge, and you might find her with head down, eyes glued to the ground. She’s not being anti-social, or lamenting a flubbed grade — this dynamic archaeology concentrator just knows that often the most fascinating stories can be found underfoot.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
June 1766 — Designed by colonial governor Sir Francis Bernard, the new Harvard Hall (still standing, with several later modifications) opens to replace its predecessor, destroyed by fire in 1764.
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Nation & World
Precocious pundit Alexander Burns is off to D.C.
While still an undergraduate, Alexander Burns already had an impact on political discourse in the United States. Beginning in 2005, the history and literature concentrator has been a principal contributor to a political blog sponsored by the history magazine American Heritage. The job has allowed him to explore the pros and cons of contemporary issues,…