Featured series 
Tag: History
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Campus & Community
Serhii Plokhii is new Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History
Serhii Plokhii, a prolific scholar whose studies have opened up a new pathway of studying Ukraine’s relationship with Eastern and Central Europe, has been appointed Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), effective July 1.
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Nation & World
Journalism less appreciated, still essential, says NPR’s Daniel Schorr
The public has a much more jaundiced opinion about journalists than the almost heroic image they had during the Watergate era, but society needs the press to do its job just the same, National Public Radio analyst Daniel Schorr said Tuesday (March 13). “What is clear is that the press can no longer rely on…
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Arts & Culture
Music, words to honor Longfellow on poet’s 200th birthday
The Boston Landmarks Orchestra will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) with a March 25 tribute at Sanders Theatre.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
March 5, 1954 — The Faculty of Arts and Sciences approves the Special Standing Program recently proposed by the Educational Policy Committee. The program allows specially qualified high-school students who have completed 11th grade to enter as freshmen, specially qualified freshmen to enter as advanced-standing sophomores, and honors candidates to have one or two required…
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Campus & Community
Seminar on gender history seeks participants
The March 15 application deadline for “Writing Past Lives: Biography as History” — the Schlesinger Library’s summer seminar on gender history — is fast approaching. Established scholars, writers, and advanced graduate students in U.S. history and gender studies are invited to apply.
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Campus & Community
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dies at 89
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a member of Harvard’s History Department from 1954 until 1962, died Feb. 27 in New York City. He was 89.
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Nation & World
Schulz: U.S. should take stand on torture
“The ancient Greeks would have been ashamed of us.” That was the assessment of Amnesty International USA’s former executive director William Schulz of the U.S. military’s abuses of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. Schulz said that Greeks and Romans routinely tortured slaves as a way to establish the truth of a situation…
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Science & Tech
Medieval Islamic architecture presages 20th century mathematics
Intricate decorative tilework found in medieval architecture across the Islamic world appears to exhibit advanced decagonal quasicrystal geometry – a concept discovered by Western mathematicians and physicists only in the 1970s and 1980s. If so, medieval Islamic application of this geometry would predate Western mastery by at least half a millennium.
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Arts & Culture
Boym turns chance errors into chancy art
Svetlana Boym leads a double life. Her faculty Web page identifies her as the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature. She is the author of several scholarly books and teaches courses with titles like “Memory and Modernity” and “Russian Culture from Revolution to Perestroika.”
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Arts & Culture
Urban design, strategic architecture
When Eve Blau speaks of Milan Lenuci, the city surveyor of Zagreb in the late 19th century, a note of reverence enters her voice. “He’s one of our great heroes,” she says. Lenuci’s finest accomplishment was the “Green Horseshoe,” a U-shaped series of parks and promenades surrounding Zagreb’s center and providing a refreshing refuge from…
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Campus & Community
Arts of the Islamic World: A Workshop for Children
In conjunction with the exhibition “Overlapping Realms: Arts of the Islamic World and India, 900-1900,” the Sackler Museum is offering a workshop in Islamic art for children ages 9 to 12. Children will learn to recognize several elements of design in Islamic art including tessellations, linear repeat patterns, and arabesques. The workshop will include a…
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Arts & Culture
The evolution of the blues
Paul Oliver, probably the world’s foremost scholar of the blues, first heard African-American vernacular music during World War II when a friend brought him to listen to black servicemen stationed in England singing work songs they had brought with them from the fields and lumber camps of the Deep South. Oliver was enthralled by the…
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Campus & Community
Chinese diarist opens door to history
Liu Dapeng (1857-1942), the subject of Henrietta Harrison’s book “The Man Awakened from Dreams” (Stanford University Press, 2005), seems an odd choice for a biography. A Confucian scholar and teacher in the village of Chiqiao in Shanxi province, northern China, Liu was poor and unknown, and, although a prolific writer, never published a word.
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Arts & Culture
The joys and perils of building a superb film archive
When Bette Davis called in sick during her time as a contract player with Warner Bros., the studio was known to send their own physician to her house to make sure she wasn’t malingering. Haden Guest mentions this intriguing fact as one of the many insights into the Hollywood studio system he gained while working…
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Feb. 12, 1974 – The Faculty of Arts and Sciences approves a three-year trial for a new undergraduate honors concentration in the Comparative Study of Religion, limited to 10 students per year.
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Nation & World
Richardson explores what motivates ‘targeting of noncombatants’
What do terrorists want? The question has reverberated in the consciousness of the West ever since the dreadful and unexpected events of 9/11. Were these appalling acts of violence perpetrated because “They hate our freedoms,” as President Bush asserted? Are terrorists simply insane, barbaric, nihilistic, as others have theorized?
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Campus & Community
Conference in China remembers Benjamin Schwartz
A major international conference was held Dec. 16-18 at East China Normal University in Shanghai on the occasion of the late Professor Benjamin Schwartz’s 90th birthday. The conference brought together distinguished scholars from the United States, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia to celebrate and honor the scholarly interests and accomplishments of Schwartz,…
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Nation & World
Seven deadly sins on collision course with market forces
Using the seven deadly sins to examine corporate social responsibility, Kennedy School Professor Herman “Dutch” Leonard explained that today’s market-based economy exploits behavior that is deeply embedded in man’s evolutionary history.
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Arts & Culture
The many lives of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Most of us only get one life. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – whose 200th birthday bicentennial is this month – has had four. In the first, he arrived in Cambridge in 1837, fresh from a six-year professorship at Bowdoin College. Longfellow, sporting long hair, yellow gloves, and flowered waistcoats, cut quite a romantic, European-style figure in…
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Campus & Community
Undergrad grants available through Schlesinger Library
The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America invites Harvard undergraduates to make use of the library’s collections with competitive awards (ranging from $100 to $2,500) for relevant research projects.
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Campus & Community
Franklin L. Ford
Franklin L. Ford served as a major participant in this Faculty’s business throughout his career, as Assistant and Associate Professor, Allston Burr Senior Tutor of Lowell House, McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History, and as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from fall l962 through spring 1970.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
September 1936 – During the first two weeks of September, Harvard convenes a Tercentenary Conference of Arts and Sciences. More than 10,000 faculty members at 54 institutions nationwide are invited; over 2,000 attend. Seventy-one scholars give papers in four areas: Arts and Letters, Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences.
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Arts & Culture
A renovated Woodberry Poetry Room
This week the George Edward Woodberry Poetry Room reopened after a summerlong renovation, reuniting scholars, poets, and poetry lovers with an unprecedented collection of books, pamphlets, magazines, broadsides, manuscripts, video recordings of poets, rare author photographs, and paintings and sculptures created by poets – in fact anything related to 20th and 21st century poetry.
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Campus & Community
This month in Harvard history
Sept. 1, 1779 — The College holds £15,000 in continental loan certificates and £600 in state treasury notes.
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Campus & Community
Sons of American Revolution welcome Gates
Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) on July 10 at the society’s 116th annual convention, held in Addison, Texas.