Featured series 
Tag: History
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
February 1943 — Animator Walt Disney visits Harvard to consult with Anthropology Department Chair Earnest A. Hooton about a forthcoming Technicolor film ridiculing Adolf Hitler’s racist theories. On the steps of the Faculty Club, Disney tells the Boston press that he plans to leave Hitler “out of the picture,” since “too much attention has already…
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Campus & Community
Painting of Kiyo Morimoto is unveiled
The Harvard Foundation unveiled the portrait of Kiyo Morimoto, former director of the Bureau of Study Counsel in the Dunster House Dining Room last week (Feb 1). Morimoto served the bureau from 1958 to 1985 and is remembered as as a widely respected counselor by generations of students. A thoughtful listener, he offered soft-spoken, helpful…
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Health
‘Where do I come from?’
Harvard graduates often return to the University to let their professors know what they’ve been up to since they finished their degree.
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Nation & World
War and changing concepts of masculinity
The Vietnam War cost the United States just over 58,000 dead — less than 5 percent of the 1.4 million Vietnamese, French, and other military personnel killed in Indochina combat going back to 1950.
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Arts & Culture
Exploring tangled legacy of slavery
Certain adages exist about historical repetition: those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it, for example, or history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. Walter Johnson doesn’t necessary believe in these old chestnuts, but he does see how the past and the present can illuminate one another in order to provide…
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Arts & Culture
Chute on graphic narratives — they’re not just comic books anymore
The title of Hillary Chute’s Nov. 29 lecture, “Out of the Gutter: Contemporary Graphic Novels by Women,” has a double meaning. It refers to the elevation of graphic narratives — comics — from the lowest, most disreputable level of artistic expression to a form worthy of New York Times best-sellerdom, literary prizes, and academic attention.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Dec. 13, 1856 — A(bbott) Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s future 22nd President, is born in Boston.
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Arts & Culture
‘The diverse ways history can be written’
Relocating to a foreign city for a new job can be stressful in the most congenial circumstances. Trying to depart your home country in the middle of a Communist coup? As Serhii Plokhii, Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, can tell you — that’s downright complicated.
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Arts & Culture
Scholar uses Singer sewing machine to parse cultural, economic development
Harvard historian Andrew D. Gordon ’74, Ph.D. ’81 specializes in modern Japan and has written or edited a handful of breakthrough books on big labor, big steel, and big management.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Nov. 11, 1951 — On Armistice Day (now Veterans’ Day), an overflow crowd jams the Memorial Church for the dedication of the World War II Memorial wall, bearing the names of those from the Harvard family who gave their lives in service to the nation. The guest preacher is the Rt. Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill,…
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Campus & Community
K School celebrates Ida B. Wells with poster
The Kennedy School of Government (KSG) recently celebrated the launch of poster reproductions of the portrait of Ida B. Wells that hangs in the School’s Fainsod Room. The painting of Wells — a fierce anti-lynching crusader and journalist — was installed in April 2006 next to Winston Churchill. It marked the first commissioned oil portrait…
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Nation & World
Armstrong: God is hard to get to know
Man’s practical understanding of God, said one religious scholar speaking at Harvard, is “like a goldfish trying to understand a computer. … It will always be beyond us.”
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Campus & Community
Allston-Brighton celebrates its 200th birthday
More than 300 guests attended a gala event on Nov. 17 at the new WGBH offices on Guest Street in Brighton in honor of the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Brighton and Allston communities.
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Campus & Community
University namesake celebrates 400th
It is 1607 in England. Queen Elizabeth I has died only four years earlier. King James I, her successor, has already commissioned a new Bible translation that will indelibly mark the English language four years later.
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Arts & Culture
Africans, ‘Africanness,’ and the Soviets
It’s no secret that a century and a half after the Civil War, the United States still struggles to come to terms with the legacy of African slavery.
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Arts & Culture
Houghton exhibit features ‘luminous’ historian
While Edward Gibbon was publishing his six-volume opus, “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” a large portion of Britain’s empire was declaring its independence and fighting to break free of the mother country.
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Arts & Culture
Scholar looks at abiding interest in the ‘Great American Novel’
Literary critics tend to discredit the concept of a “Great American Novel” as nothing more than media hype — an arbitrary appellation that has more to do with pipe dreams than merit. And yet, what would-be author hasn’t imagined, when putting pen to paper, what it would feel like to be hailed as the greatest…
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
November 1791 — A writer in the Boston press accuses Harvard of poisoning students’ minds with Edward Gibbon’s monumental “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1776-88). President Joseph Willard replies that far from even considering Gibbon, the College uses a text by French historian Abbé Millot. Nathaniel Ames, who left Harvard…
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Campus & Community
Somber, joyful service marks 75th birthday
Over a thousand people crowded into the Memorial Church Sunday (Nov. 11) for a special birthday. Seventy-five years earlier, almost to the minute, the Colonial-style structure was dedicated on Armistice Day 1932.
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Arts & Culture
Digging history in Harvard Yard
It was crowded in the hole in Harvard Yard, with sophomore Reyzl Geselowitz and freshman Alison Liewen crouching in the square pit, elbow to elbow and more than a yard deep in Harvard’s dark earth.
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Arts & Culture
Borderless America
Sometimes what we call something changes the way we see it. Steven Hahn wants to call the groups of escaped slaves who found refuge in the northern United States prior to the Civil War “maroon communities.”
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Arts & Culture
Kennedy Center to showcase A.R.T. production
The American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) will join nine other theater groups to present at the 10th New Visions/New Voices festival this spring (April 25-27) at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
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Nation & World
Researcher finds roots of fundamentalism in 16th century Bible translations
The English Reformation — heyday of religious change — spurred a fundamentalist approach to Bible reading, according to new research by a Harvard professor.
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Arts & Culture
Tools for ‘navigating childhood’
The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen have enchanted children the world over for more than two centuries with their verbal sorcery and expressive intensity. Now their iconic power has drawn the attention of a Harvard professor, who hopes to broaden our understanding of how those eye-widening fairy tales expand the imaginations of children.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Nov. 23, 1876 — Princeton convenes a meeting in Springfield, Mass., that results in the formation of the Intercollegiate Football Association (Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia). Yale decides not to join but does contribute to the development of the IFA’s modified rugby rules.
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Campus & Community
Newsmakers
Swanee Hunt, founding director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), accepted the Leadership in Advocacy Award from the Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence (ATASK) at the group’s 14th annual Silk Road Gala Nov. 3 at the Boston Marriott Copley Plaza Hotel. “The Conquest of Nature” by…
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Campus & Community
‘Politics, social movements’ focus of fellows
James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History Joyce Chaplin, director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, has announced the names of nine resident scholars participating in the center’s 2007-08 workshop, “Politics and Social Movements.” Leading the workshop are Lisa McGirr, professor of history, and Daniel Carpenter, professor of government.
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Arts & Culture
Rehding finds ‘monumental’ works key to German political history
In December 1989, a few weeks after the reunification of Germany, Leonard Bernstein ’39 raised his baton above the ruins of the Berlin Wall and conducted a special arrangement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The central statement of the work — “all men will be brothers” — captured the sentiment of those who saw a brighter…
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Arts & Culture
Taxonomist Carl Linnaeus on show at HMNH
Carl Linnaeus believed that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was not an apple but a banana. He came to this conclusion in 1737, while studying plant specimens at Hartecamp, the estate of George Clifford, a wealthy Dutch banker and director of the Dutch East India Company. Clifford collected exotic plants from around the…