Featured series 
Tag: History
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Arts & Culture
Mining a trove of old ballads gives women a new voice
In the mid-1930s, Milman Parry, a professor in the Department of the Classics at Harvard, traveled throughout Yugoslavia to research and record folk songs. Assisted by his former student Albert Lord, Parry spent 15 months on the road and returned to Harvard with innumerable texts and sound recordings of more than 1,500 epic songs. Their…
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
March 23, 1639 — In recognition of John Harvard’s recent bequest, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony orders “that the colledge agreed upon formerly to bee built at Cambridg shalbee called Harvard Colledge.”
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Arts & Culture
The first civil rights movement
Most of us think of the Civil Rights movement as something that took place in the transitional 1950s and the tumultuous 1960s. It’s seen as a cultural artifact squeezed between the defiance of Rosa Parks (1955) and the demise of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968).
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Arts & Culture
Exploring the shadows
“If you wouldn’t tell Stalin, don’t tell anyone else!” In the early years of the Cold War, a billboard near an atomic bomb testing site in New Mexico urged passersby to keep research developments close to the vest. Secrecy was of the utmost importance in that era — and not just in scientific circles —…
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Health
History of Women in Medicine fellowship material due March 1
The Foundation for the History of Women in Medicine (FHWIM) is offering two fellowships to support research conducted at the Center for the History of Medicine and its Archives for Women in Medicine, located at Harvard Medical School’s Countway Library.
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Arts & Culture
Ancient text has long and dangerous reach
Ask a well-read individual to list the most dangerous books in history, and a few familiar titles would most likely make the cut: Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” Marx and Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto,” Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book.”
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
February 1950 — A capacity Sanders Theatre crowd hears Eleanor Roosevelt discuss “The World Struggle for Human Rights,” as guest of Harvard’s United Nations Council. She urges the U.S. to ratify the U.N. Covenant of Human Rights, the legal underpinning to the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.
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Arts & Culture
HCL maps set in stone
Three years ago, Big Dig officials approached David Cobb and his staff in the Harvard Map Collection with a request: Help them design a map for the North End parks that would illustrate how Boston had changed in the centuries since its founding. When the parks officially opened in November 2007, not one but seven…
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Arts & Culture
HUL launches extensive ‘Contagion’ collection
The Harvard University Library (HUL) Open Collections Program recently launched http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/contagion. Created with support from Arcadia, the new collection, titled “Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics,” brings carefully selected historical materials from Harvard’s renowned libraries, special collections, and archives to Internet users everywhere.
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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.