Featured series 
Tag: History
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Arts & Culture
Darnton looks at the ‘art and politics of libel’ in 18th century France
Government censors in pre-Revolutionary France were so hypervigilant that under their watchful eyes no one with anything significant to say dared publish their works in their own country. The solution was to publish abroad and smuggle the contraband books into France where they were soon snapped up by eager readers.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Nov. 6, 1770 — Rumblings of Revolution: Joseph Avery, Class of 1771, orates on “Oppression and Tyranny” before the Speaking Club.
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Arts & Culture
Washington Allston, a name to remember
When you graduate from a University that counts dozens of U.S. presidents and Supreme Court justices — and hundreds of distinguished scholars, scientists, and Nobel Prize winners — among its alumni, it is easy, even for the most accomplished and talented, to slip through the cracks into obscurity. One such alumnus whose reputation has fallen…
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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…
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Arts & Culture
Title IX talk shows knotty issues are alive and well
More than 30 years after its enactment, Title IX is still a topic of hot debate.
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Arts & Culture
Remembering with the Memorial Church at 75
When the 11th hour struck on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the four-year nightmare of World War I — “The Great War” — officially ended. The world awoke to find some 22 million dead and a like number physically wounded. Never before had any generation witnessed such concentrated death and destruction.…
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
October 1836 — In the “North American Review,” Henry Russell Cleveland, Class of 1827, aims a verbal wrecking ball at Harvard’s buildings:
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Arts & Culture
Memorabilia in NCT tell dramatic story
The New College Theatre has yet to see its first performance, but already the building seems to echo with audience laughter and the pleasant dissonance of a tuning orchestra. In the lobby, one can almost hear a whisper of “break a leg” or the clink of glasses at a postproduction fête rising faintly from the…
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Nation & World
How Sputnik changed U.S. education
Education experts said Oct. 4 that the United States may be overdue for a science education overhaul like the one undertaken after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite 50 years ago, and predicted that a window for change may open as the Iraq war winds down.
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Nation & World
JFK and the Cuban missile crisis — a new assessment
The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 has been called the “single most serious moment in human history.” During the 40 years of the Cold War, it was the closest the United States and the Soviet Union ever came to nuclear war.
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Health
Biologists remember landmark theory
Forty years ago, Edward O. Wilson and Robert H. MacArthur described how size and isolation determine how many species an island can support. Last week, biologists gathered to mark the theory’s anniversary, calling it a “pivotal point” in ecology’s relatively short history.
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Arts & Culture
Harvey Mansfield on politics, the humanities, and science
Harvey Mansfield wants to reintroduce the concept of thumos into political science. As employed by Plato and Aristotle, thumos refers to the “part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance.” Mansfield believes that modern political science has excluded thumos, and as a result has narrowed its understanding of what…
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Nation & World
Treating workers like people: A history
“The Human Relations Movement: The Harvard Business School and the Hawthorne Experiments (1924-1933),” the first in a series of exhibits to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Harvard Business School (HBS), is on view through Jan. 17 at the School’s Baker Library.
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Arts & Culture
Provocative Civil War exhibit at Fogg to coincide with inauguration
An exhibition opens at the Fogg Art Museum this Saturday (Oct. 6) that will have lots of people talking.
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Arts & Culture
Maya, Aztec monument casts get the shake-out, dust-off
Plaster reproductions of Maya and Aztec carvings, which preserve precious details now lost on the originals, are leaving dusty, haphazard storage for cleaning, cataloging, and crating that will prepare them for a new era of usefulness and relevance.
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Campus & Community
American Indians bless search for Harvard roots
With a ceremonial blessing and a cautionary reminder of native peoples’ historic oppression, a group of American Indian leaders joined an assemblage of experienced and budding archaeologists Wednesday (Sept. 26) to begin the search for Harvard’s Indian College roots.
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Nation & World
Conference celebrates tribal governance
Imagine the map of the United States as it really is. Not 50 states, but 50 states plus 562 sovereign nations — the 562 federally recognized American Indian tribes and communities that exist within U.S. borders.
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Nation & World
At Kennedy School, Iraqi foreign minister outlines recent progress
“Iraq is back,” the country’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, told his audience at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Kennedy School of Government Oct 1. With the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein replaced by a “constitutional, democratically elected government,” Iraq is in the midst of “a truly historic transformation” as important as “any…
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Arts & Culture
Exhibitions from Harvard Archives to mark presidential inauguration
In conjunction with the Oct. 12 inauguration of Drew Faust as president of Harvard, the Harvard University Archives has developed two special exhibitions that highlight the history of Harvard, its governance, and its presidency.
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Arts & Culture
Scholars give us antiquity — the colorized version
For artists of the Renaissance, the key to truth and beauty lay in the past. Renaissance artists assiduously studied the sculptures and monuments of Greece and Rome and emulated them in their own work. The inspiration they found in those ancient models has echoed down the centuries, influencing the appearance of Western art and architecture…
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Sept. 19, 1782 — The Harvard Corporation votes to establish the Medical School, following a detailed plan from President Joseph Willard and Professor Edward Wigglesworth. The plan calls for new books in chemistry and medicine, “a complete anatomical and surgical apparatus,” three new professorships, and organized lectures with required clinical components.
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Campus & Community
Weatherhead Center names 2007-08 associates
The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs is supporting 24 doctoral candidates as Graduate Student Associates for 2007-08. The associates represent a multidisciplinary group of advanced-degree candidates from Harvard’s departments of Anthropology, Government, History, Religion, and Sociology; the Kennedy School’s Public Policy Program; and the Law School’s S.J.D. program. All of the students are working on…
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Arts & Culture
Little Rock Central: 50 years later
It’s been half a century, but it feels like just yesterday for at least one member of the “Little Rock Nine.” “I can’t feel this so strong, it doesn’t make sense … you are supposed to be over it,” says an emotional Minnijean Brown Trickey in the opening of the film “Little Rock Central High:…
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Arts & Culture
Harvard Map Collection digitizes historic Cambridge and Boston atlases
The Harvard Map Collection’s atlases of historic Cambridge have much to reveal about the city and the University’s past. Looking at these oversized documents one learns, for instance, that 135 years ago, Harvard students boarded their horses in the University stables where the current-day John Harvard’s Brew House operates, and that, as of 1903, the…
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Arts & Culture
New journal casts a critical look at the ‘Swinging Sixties’
From the New Left to the sexual revolution, scholarship on 1960s America has focused primarily on social protest and the counterculture. Now, John McMillian, a lecturer on history and literature, plans to expand how we think about one of the nation’s most complex and colorful eras.
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Arts & Culture
Ulrich explains that well-behaved women should make history
Most bumper sticker slogans do not originate in academic publications. However, in the 1970s, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich penned in a scholarly article about the funeral sermons of Christian women that “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” The phrase subsequently gained wide popularity, appearing on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other items — and it’s now the title…
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Arts & Culture
Peter and Anne Brooke give collection to HUAM
Peter A.B. ’52, M.B.A. ’54 and Anne Brooke of Boston have announced plans to bequeath their collection of 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings to the Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM).