Featured series 
Tag: History
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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).
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Arts & Culture
New exhibit at Houghton Library features decorated papers
In the 1930s when Boston bookbinder and society matron Rosamond B. Loring (1889–1950) was unable to find ornamental papers she considered good enough to serve as end leaves for her books, she took matters into her own hands, teaching herself to make what are known in bookbinding as “decorated papers.” Her initiative, especially with paste…
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Campus & Community
This Month in Harvard history
Sept. 19, 1639 — Accused of neglecting and physically mistreating students, Nathaniel Eaton is fined and discharged as Master of the College by the Great and General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Harvard closes its doors and dismisses students after little more than a year’s operation.
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Campus & Community
Danilov Monastery bells to ring in Russia once more
Nearly 80 years after they were rescued by plumbing magnate Charles R. Crane, the Lowell House bells are returning to their original home in the Danilov Monastery in Moscow.
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Arts & Culture
Harvard Foundation honors Ruby Dee
Ruby Dee — civil rights activist, star of stage and screen, and the surviving half of a pair who, for much of the 20th century, reigned as the first couple of African-American theater — made it to Harvard this week.
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Arts & Culture
Artists and ‘double consciousness’
The Vietnam War was traumatic for many Americans, but far more so for the Vietnamese, 3 million of whom were driven out of their country and scattered across the globe by the war’s end. The diaspora included many children who grew to maturity with a sense of belonging to two cultures, the one left behind…
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Campus & Community
Upon meeting a scholar of literature, one is likely to ask, “What period do you study?” with the likely answer being a fairly narrow slice of the literary pie — the 19th century novel, say, or nondramatic poetry of the Renaissance. With Panagiotis Roilos, however, the answer is not so straightforward.
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Health
Humans hot, sweaty, natural-born runners
Hairless, clawless, and largely weaponless, ancient humans used the unlikely combination of sweatiness and relentlessness to gain the upper hand over their faster, stronger, generally more dangerous animal prey, Harvard Anthropology Professor Daniel Lieberman said Thursday (April 12).
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Arts & Culture
Albert Einstein, Civil Rights activist
Einstein’s response to the racism and segregation he found in Princeton was to cultivate relationships in the town’s African-American community. Jerome and Taylor interviewed members of that community who still remember the white-haired, disheveled figure of Einstein strolling through their streets, stopping to chat with the inhabitants, and handing out candy to local children.
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Nation & World
Notorious U.S. Supreme Court decision is revisited
Dred Scott. You don’t have to be a lawyer or historian to have that name conjure up feelings of horror and injustice.
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Arts & Culture
The ‘Last Ruskinians’: Detail, detail, detail
Many of the paintings and drawings in the Fogg Museum’s new exhibition “The Last Ruskinians: Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Herbert Moore, and Their Circle” are astounding for their jewel-like detail and trompe l’oeil realism, but to regard them as a higher sort of eye candy would be to miss the point.
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Arts & Culture
A denarius in hand is worth two in a book
On exhibit at the Harvard University Art Museums are wide and deep collections that range from ancient Greece statuary to Ottoman textiles to Max Beckmann masterpieces to contemporary American graphic arts. As stunning and numerous as are the objects on display, significant portions of the museums’ collections are not always up on the walls but…
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Arts & Culture
A new look at the ‘Good War’
World War II has been called “The Good War,” often in contrast to later conflicts whose moral justification is seen as more ambivalent. But how did the Good War become good, and what aspects of it had to be suppressed to qualify it for that title? Three scholars attempted to answer that question at a…
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Arts & Culture
Modern Girl Project views women between the wars
When American women won the right to vote in 1919, the logical question was, What next? Suffragists had the answer ready: full enjoyment of civil and domestic life for women, equal to that of men. But suffragists found out that what was next was not much. It would be decades before American women gained anything…
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Campus & Community
Edward Willett Wagner
Edward Willett Wagner, Professor of Korean Studies at Harvard for thirty-five years and founder of Korean studies in the United States, passed away at the age of 77 on December 7, 2001. He left his wife, Namhi Kim Wagner; two sons, Robert Camner and J. Christopher Wagner; three stepdaughters, Yunghi Choi Wagner, Sokhi Choi Wagner,…
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Arts & Culture
Week of events at Radcliffe links history and biography
Twentieth century American historian Susan Ware will lead another workshop group. She’s an independent scholar who has written several biographies, including one of Earhart. At the Radcliffe Institute from 1997 to 2005, Ware was editor of volume five of the biographical dictionary “Notable American Women.”