It Happened at U-M
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April 14, 2025
Aero Club and hot air balloons
In 1914, the first aeronautics class was offered at U-M, launching what would become the country’s first collegiate aeronautics program. U-M students were also learning about aeronautics outside the classroom as they took to the skies in gliders, simple planes — and, by the 1920s, hot air balloons.
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April 7, 2025
One hundred years of Angell Hall
Angell Hall, one of the Ann Arbor campus’ most iconic academic buildings and home to the Fishbowl was developed in the 1920s to address overcrowding on campus. The 152,000-square-foot building was completed in 1924 at a cost of just over $1 million.
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March 31, 2025
How maize and blue became U-M’s colors
Blue had been an unofficial color of U-M since the school’s founding, and maize was chosen by students because it provided a nice contrast to the blue. With no standards initially implemented, the hues of the colors varied until a committee commissioned in 1912 by the Board of Regents settled on the current colors.
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March 24, 2025
Founder of famed survey scale was U-M alum
Rensis Likert, a U-M alum, groundbreaking researcher and co-founder of the university’s Institute for Social Research, created the Likert scale. Likert scales have been used in research surveys in a wide variety of industries, from academics to the government to private research.
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March 17, 2025
When the Wolverines won it all in 1989
When March Madness begins, and 68 Division I men’s basketball teams will vie to become national champion. The U-M men’s team has made it to the championship game seven times since the NCAA Tournament began in 1939, winning it all in 1989 — its first and, so far, only national championship.
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March 10, 2025
The Royal Shakespeare Company came to town
In 2001, the Royal Shakespeare Company performed an historic 27-hour marathon at the Power Center for Performing Arts, presented by the University Musical Society. The performance was so successful and popular it kicked off an 11-year relationship between the RSC, U-M and UMS that included three residencies.
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February 24, 2025
First weather report’s creator had U-M roots
Cleveland Abbe, a U-M employee who studied astronomy in the late 1850s, eventually turned his focus to the weather and in 1869, created a regional weather service, based in Cincinnati. Not long after, newspapers across the country were printing Abbe’s daily reports called “probabilities,” and weather forecasts were born.
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February 17, 2025
The story behind U-M’s fight song
The rousing tune of “The Victors” is familiar to most U-M faculty and staff. What may be less widely known is the fight song’s origin. In November 1898, student Louis Elbel was in the stands when U-M’s football team beat the University of Chicago for an undefeated season. The song came to him during postgame revelry.
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February 10, 2025
A novelist grows in Ann Arbor
Years before Betty Smith published her best-selling, semi-autobiographical novel, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” in 1943, she gained her voice as a writer at U-M. Smith arrived in Ann Arbor in the 1920s and snuck into the university’s drama, writing, journalism and literature courses to see what the students were learning there.
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February 3, 2025
A disease’s gene is discovered
In May 1989, geneticist-physician Francis Collins of U-M was part of a research group that isolated the gene for cystic fibrosis and identified a faulty protein it produced that they believe caused the disease. Identifying the gene took eight years and was part of a broader project, known as “positional cloning.”
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