Tag: History

  • 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.

  • Campus & Community

    How doctors think, past and present

    Physician and historian David Jones works to bridge the gap between medical science and the social forces that shape it, as Harvard’s first A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine.

  • Campus & Community

    How Harvard celebrated

    A look at how Harvard has celebrated some previous anniversaries.

  • Arts & Culture

    Around the world in many ways

    Historian Joyce Chaplin is completing her latest book, on the history and influence of circumnavigation. For her, globalization is an old story.

  • Arts & Culture

    Tocqueville’s Discovery of America

    Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor on Literature Leo Damrosch retraces the nine-month journey through America by historian Alexis de Tocqueville, author of “Democracy in America,” who cannily predicted the growing social unrest toward slavery in America.

  • Arts & Culture

    Andrew Johnson

    Professor of Law Annette Gordon-Reed tackles one of the worst presidents in American history, claiming that his own racism was to blame for his shoddy performance during the Reconstruction era.

  • Arts & Culture

    High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg

    This biography by Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History and Professor of Business Administration, chronicles the life of Siegmund Warburg, a financial wiz, prophet of globalization, and strategic businessman.

  • Arts & Culture

    His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra and India’s Struggle Against Empire

    Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs Sugata Bose parses the life of Indian revolutionary Subhas Chandra Bose, who struggled to liberate his people from British rule and led the Indian National Army against Allied Forces during World War II.

  • Arts & Culture

    Fleeing America

    In “Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World,” historian Maya Jasanoff reveals the lesser-known history of loyalists after the Revolution.

  • Health

    Debunking a myth

    Studying dead women’s cut-up bodies was not what Katharine Park originally set out to do. But a trip to Florence opened a new chapter in the scholar’s life.

  • Arts & Culture

    The Moche of Ancient Peru: Media and Messages

    Jeffrey Quilter, a senior lecturer on anthropology and deputy director for curatorial affairs and curator at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, introduces the Moche civilization and explores current thinking about Moche politics, history, society, and religion.

  • Arts & Culture

    The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea

    This selection of essays edited by Ezra F. Vogel, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus, and Byung-Kook Kim recovers and contextualizes many of the ambiguities in South Korea’s trajectory from poverty to a sustainable high rate of economic growth.

  • Campus & Community

    Touring the Yard with John Stilgoe

    Harvard professor John Stilgoe takes viewers on a tour of historic Harvard Yard and explores its many unique and exciting features.