Tag: History

  • Campus & Community

    David S. Landes, 89, dies

    David S. Landes, a renowned historian whose work focused on the complex interplay of cultural mores and historical circumstance, died Aug. 17 at age 89.

  • Arts & Culture

    On the nature of difference

    Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds discussed her book “The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics” before 50 students as part of Wintersession activities.

  • Nation & World

    The rise, ruin of China trader

    An exhibit and companion website developed by Harvard Business School’s Baker Library shines light on the early days of trade between China and the United States.

  • Arts & Culture

    Lincoln’s dimensions

    Screenwriter and playwright Tony Kushner sat down with President Drew Faust to dissect Abraham Lincoln’s legacy and talk history, politics, and writing after a Harvard-sponsored screening of his new biopic, “Lincoln.”

  • Arts & Culture

    Apocalypse now? Hardly

    During a sometimes tongue-in-cheek lecture on Wednesday, Professor David Carrasco discussed the historical origins of humankind’s periodic preoccupations with the apocalypse.

  • Nation & World

    What history gives the present

    Eight Harvard historians gathered at Emerson Hall with an ambitious goal in mind: to explain — in eight minutes or less — apiece — that “everything is history and history is everything.”

  • Nation & World

    The psychology of poverty

    A fellow in a new joint Harvard-MIT fellowship program in economics, history, and politics opens a lab in Kenya to illuminate the economic decision-making of those studied least by economists: the poor.

  • Arts & Culture

    From cradle to grave, through history

    In “The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death,” Professor Jill Lepore shows, with wit and wisdom, that our existential anxieties are anything but new.

  • Arts & Culture

    Harvard in the War of 1812

    The War of 1812 touched Harvard only lightly, a new exhibit shows, but the end of the conflict was much welcomed in Anglophile New England.

  • Campus & Community

    Scholar publishes book on Civil War

    “Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War,” a book by Megan Kate Nelson, has recently been published by the University of Georgia Press.

  • Campus & Community

    Celebrate 375

    This year, Harvard is celebrating the 375th anniversary of the founding of Harvard College in 1636. Visit the official 375th website for more information about the University-wide celebration.

  • Campus & Community

    ‘Continential Divide’ awarded

    The American Philosophical Society awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize for the best book in cultural history published in 2010 to Amabel B. James Professor of History Peter E. Gordon.

  • Arts & Culture

    Hard-earned gains for women at Harvard

    Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, professor emerita of history and American studies at Smith College, examined the shifting gender landscape at Harvard during a talk at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

  • Arts & Culture

    Poetry in motion

    Something about Harvard, one of the world’s most rigorous universities also helps poets to blossom. It has a lyric legacy that spans hundreds of years and helped to shape the world’s literary canon.

  • Arts & Culture

    Echoes of the Titanic

    On the centennial of the ship’s sinking, Harvard historian Steven Biel has a new edition of his book, which traces the cultural arc of that myth-making disaster.

  • Campus & Community

    Political science, in his marrow

    Using history as a lens to predict future political trends has been the focus of Daniel Ziblatt’s career and informs his work as an educator, researcher, and author.

  • Campus & Community

    Oscar Handlin

    At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on March 6, 2012, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Oscar Handlin, Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Professor Handlin was the most influential and creative historian of American social life in the second half of…

  • Campus & Community

    The Meaning of Life – Jill Lepore – Harvard Thinks Big

    Jill Lepore David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History

  • Campus & Community

    Giza in Another Dimension – Innovation at Harvard

    What if you could enter a decorated tomb chapel in a Giza pyramid, descend down an ancient burial shaft, or see 5,000-year-old inscriptions come to life—without ever having to travel?

  • Campus & Community

    Cohen named dean of Radcliffe

    Lizabeth Cohen, an eminent scholar of 20th-century American social and political history and interim dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study since last July, has been named dean, Harvard President Drew Faust announced March 8.

  • Arts & Culture

    The Last Supper as Passover

    A leading cultural and intellectual historian of Renaissance Europe, Princeton Professor Anthony Grafton suggests that the diligent work of 16th-century scholar Joseph Scaliger, in particular, led to the theory that the Last Supper may well have been in fact a Passover Seder.

  • Campus & Community

    Remembering the co-ed experiment

    A search sheds light on the controversial turning point 40 years ago when men and women first shared housing in Pforzheimer and Winthrop.

  • Arts & Culture

    The West, plagued by self-doubt

    In his new book, noted historian Niall Ferguson sees Europe and America as facing a profound crisis of confidence in what the future holds.

  • Campus & Community

    The Civil War’s allures, and horrors

    People are “powerfully attracted to war,” Harvard President Drew Faust told a crowd at the Cambridge Public Library on Jan. 10, and no conflict draws as much continuing interest and controversy in America as its own Civil War. The historian’s job is to balance that allure with a search for the truth, Faust said.

  • Campus & Community

    A look inside: Lowell House

    With the holidays nigh, Lowell House residents celebrated with the Yule Dinner, where they observed some pagan traditions such as “bringing greens into homes at midwinter, kindling lights and fires at the darkest time of year, and feasting at table with loved ones,” according to House Master Diana Eck.

  • Campus & Community

    Jasanoff’s book wins honor

    Harvard History Professor Maya Jasanoff has been named the winner of a Recognition of Excellence Award as part of the 2011 Cundill Prize in History at McGill University for her book “Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World.” The prize recognizes history books that have a profound literary, social, and academic impact.

  • Arts & Culture

    On the side of the angels

    In his latest book, psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker cites data to show that the world is becoming far more peaceful than you might have thought.

  • Campus & Community

    Reshaping the Humanities

    Stephen Greenblatt Cogan University Professor

  • Campus & Community

    Oscar Handlin, historian, 95

    Oscar Handlin, Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus, died from a heart attack on Sept. 20 at his Cambridge home. He was 95.

  • Nation & World

    Harvard Remembers 9/11

    The Harvard community remembers where they were on September 11th and reflects on how it has changed their lives and the world around them.