Featured series 
Tag: History
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Nation & World
Renowned Lincoln historian David Herbert Donald dies at 88
David Herbert Donald, Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of American Civilization Emeritus, died Sunday (May 17) of heart failure at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He was 88. Donald, a leading historian of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, was born in 1920 in Goodman, Miss., then a segregated town,…
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Nation & World
Libraries launch ‘Expeditions and Discoveries’
Harvard’s Open Collections Program has launched “Expeditions and Discoveries: Sponsored Exploration and Scientific Discovery in the Modern Age.” Through the new collection, Internet users can find thousands of maps, photographs, and published materials, along with field notes, letters, and unique manuscript materials on sponsored exploration and related scientific discoveries between 1626 and 1953.
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Nation & World
How’d the Russians get the H-bomb?
Ever hear of Elugelab? Until Oct. 31, 1952, it was an island on Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Then it vanished, consumed in the fireball of the world’s first hydrogen bomb.
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Nation & World
On the road in the fifth century: Visions of heaven, hell
During the fifth century, travelers began to depart China more frequently than ever before, venturing outward from medieval cities to explore lands in Central and South Asia. A range of individuals eagerly took to the road, writing extensively about their journeys and returning home with elaborate accounts.
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Nation & World
This month in Harvard history
May 26, 1902 — The Harvard Corporation approves the construction of a temporary addition to the south side of Boylston Hall. Completed over the summer and measuring 83 by 33 feet, the add-on consists of a single large laboratory for elementary-chemistry classes and a general-use basement. The addition opens in the fall, with a stucco…
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Nation & World
Family of ‘Doc Burr’ donates ‘treasure trove of American cinema’ to HFA
It began as a childhood hobby, but for Howard Burr, collecting films became a lifelong passion. A dentist by trade, Burr amassed a collection that would make most cinephiles envious: nearly 3,000 films, including many rare prints, B films, and vintage Technicolor prints.
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Nation & World
‘Enormous changes’ in thirty years
In Chinese culture, the 60th birthday is an auspicious event. At that age, it is said that a person is at ease.
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Nation & World
Oldest living Holocaust survivor speaks at Harvard
Aided by a wheel chair, his slight frame bent in part by a curvature of the spine since birth, in part by the passage of time, a man who endured unspeakable cruelty 70 years ago told his story of survival to a Harvard audience.
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Nation & World
Evolution of a sacred text made visible at Houghton
When Jane Cheng ’09 arrived at Harvard four years ago, her interest in book conservation led to a job at the Weissman Preservation Center, and it was that job that led her to the medieval text that would become the subject of both her senior thesis and a new exhibition organized by Cheng at Houghton…
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Nation & World
This month in Harvard history
April 6-7, 1951 — The Law School holds an Institute for Practicing Lawyers focusing on legal problems of mobilizing for the Korean conflict.
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Nation & World
Leskov, Zimmerman awarded Hofer Prize for Collecting
Ilya Leskov’s love affair with the city of Paris began with a map. As a child growing up in Moscow, Leskov read the work of writers such as Dumas and Hugo, and often traced the exploits of his literary heroes across a map of the city he’d taped to the back of his front door.…
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Nation & World
Jefferson Lab Harvard’s newest historic site
The American Physical Society (APS) designated Jefferson Physical Laboratory a historical site in a special ceremony on Monday (April 27).
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Nation & World
Locke: More enlightened than we thought
English political philosopher John Locke died nearly a century before the American Revolution, and in his time parliamentary democracy was in its infancy. But his Enlightenment ideas — including the right to life, liberty, and property — went on to inspire American revolutionaries.
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Nation & World
Remembering the ‘American War’ of the ’60s
How do nations remember? In part, they remember through monuments — public art designed to capture a national memory and carry it through the ages.
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Nation & World
This month in Harvard history
April 10, 1950 — Ralph J. Bunche — AM ’28, PhD ’34, Director of the United Nations Trusteeship Department, and future winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize — is appointed to a government professorship. He is the first black named to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Bunche expects to do teaching and research…
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Nation & World
Human colonization of Australia and the Americas examined
A recent symposium about the prehistory of Australia and the Americas brought together scholars from 10,000 miles apart. But that’s nothing compared to the journey early humans made to populate Australia and the Americas tens of thousands of years ago.
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Nation & World
Lighting the fuse for the Cambrian Explosion
Harvard paleontologists have shed new light on one of the most enduring mysteries of life on Earth: the origins of the creatures that suddenly appear in the fossil record 530 million years ago in an event known as the Cambrian Explosion.
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Nation & World
Marking a century since North Pole discovered
The 100th anniversary of the discovery of the North Pole was marked this year on April 6. For more than 20 years, Harvard Foundation Director S. Allen Counter has made it a mission to bring to light the work of Matthew Henson, the African-American Arctic aide of Robert Peary, the sole explorer credited for reaching…
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Nation & World
Roughing it on Great Brewster
On the hot day of July 15, 1891, four women set off for the adventure of a lifetime in Boston Harbor. For nearly two weeks the quartet — well-educated, upper-class women from the Lowell area — “roughed it” in a quaint yet ramshackle cottage on remote Great Brewster Island, a place they considered “an enchanted…
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Nation & World
Brown honored by Organization of American Historians
For his book “The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery” (Harvard University Press, 2008), Vincent Brown, the Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History, has been selected by the Organization of American Historians (OAH) as the 2009 recipient of the Melre Curti Award. The honor, presented annually, is awarded for the…
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Nation & World
The pogrom that transformed 20th century Jewry
On April 8, 1903 — Easter Sunday — a mild disturbance against local Jews rattled Kishinev, a sleepy city on the southwestern border of imperial Russia.
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Nation & World
Cinematic reverberations
The writing of culture watcher and critic Louis Menand — Harvard’s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English — has cast a wide net over the years.
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Nation & World
Peabody preserves rare daguerreotypes
Thirty-six rare daguerreotype portraits from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology have recently been stabilized and preserved for future generations, in collaboration with the Weissman Preservation Center at Harvard University Library and the Mellon Foundation. Until photo conservators got to work, some daguerreotypes were nearly obscured by the deterioration of glass and other components,…
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Nation & World
Geospatial Library relaunched
Following a yearlong process of redesign and testing, the University Library’s Office for Information Systems has relaunched the Harvard Geospatial Library (HGL), the University’s catalog and repository of data for geographic information systems (GIS). The new HGL offers an enhanced user experience through new functionality and a highly intuitive interface.
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Nation & World
Krook looks at how women fare in international political arena
This past Sunday (March 8) was International Women’s Day, now in its 99th year. And March is National Women’s History Month. So what better time for a scholarly look at how women are faring in the political arena? Mona Lena Krook did just that, outlining in a March 4 lecture at Radcliffe Gymnasium her years…
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Nation & World
President Faust named American Historian Laureate
Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society, has announced that Drew Faust, Harvard’s president and Lincoln Professor of History, will receive the society’s fourth annual American History Book Prize for “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.”
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Nation & World
Vivid images, stern warnings mark Ice Age ‘rock’ star’s talk
Oohs and ahhs greeted slide after slide as English author and freelance scholar Paul G. Bahn presented “The Shock of the Old: New Discoveries in Ice Age Art” at the Yenching Institute Feb 26.
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Nation & World
Mothers in fiction, mothers in fact
In 1930, the French author Colette published the novel “Sido” and bound the first copy with swatches of blue fabric cut from her late mother’s favorite dress.
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Nation & World
This month in Harvard history
Ca. February 1963 — In the latest of a long series of skirmishes with Harvard, Cambridge City Councilor Alfred E. Vellucci proposes that the Lampoon Castle be converted into a public restroom.