It Happened at U-M
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October 30, 2023
Breaking barriers and making gay rights history
U-M student Kathy Kozachenko, who campaigned in residence halls and student neighborhoods, made history in 1974 by becoming the country’s first openly gay elected official. As a senior, she won a seat on the Ann Arbor City Council more than three years before Harvey Milk became the first openly gay man in public office.
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October 23, 2023
Making waves with engineering innovation
When a new engineering building opened on campus in 1904, it featured an innovation never seen on a college campus: a naval tank. Built into the foundation of the building, the basin stretched the length of a football field with 10 feet of water. Its purpose was the research and development of ships’ hulls.
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October 16, 2023
Teaching farmers in Ann Arbor
No one will mistake today’s U-M for an agricultural college. But for a few years before the Civil War, leaders were determined to teach the art and science of farming. President Henry P. Tappan was committed to building agriculture into the U-M curriculum, which pitted him against the Michigan State Agricultural Society.
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October 9, 2023
Powered by the sun
When the student-driven Solar Car Team and its car, Sunrunner, won the first Sunrayce USA in 1990, it propelled a legacy of leadership in competitive vehicles fueled by the sun. More than 100 U-M students collaborated to design, test, and build Sunrunner, with much of the work taking place on North Campus.
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October 2, 2023
‘The finest sports building in the country’
With a $745,000 price tag, Michigan’s intramural sports building was rising along Hoover Avenue in 1928. When it opened later that fall, it became the first such building on an American college campus and accommodated the growing popularity of intramural activity at U-M.
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September 25, 2023
‘They gave him ten for two’
The concert was scheduled to end at midnight. But the 15,000 people crowded into Crisler Arena were content to hang around. John Lennon was worth the wait. Lennon and Yoko Ono performed at 3 a.m. in support of John Sinclair, a radical imprisoned for possessing two marijuana cigarettes.
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September 18, 2023
‘Jazz Goes to College’
A University of Michigan audience helped make pianist Dave Brubeck an icon of 20th-century jazz. Brubeck made national headlines in 1954 with the release of “Jazz Goes to College,” which lists U-M as the recording venue. The Brubeck quartet actually performed off-campus at the Masonic Temple on Fourth Avenue.
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September 11, 2023
Physics, Ann Arbor and J. Robert Oppenheimer
What began as a modest university summer lecture program featuring notable physicists in 1923 evolved into an extraordinary series of appearances by some of the greatest minds in theoretical physics. The Summer Symposia in Theoretical Physics attracted J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, among many others.
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September 5, 2023
A dentist’s silent world
When George Gregor William Andree entered University Hall to receive his U-M diploma in 1908, he likely saw all the people assembled but did not experience were the sounds of the June ceremony. At 29, Andree received a Doctor of Dental Surgery degree, a first for a deaf man in the United States.
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August 28, 2023
‘Like life without food’
Theodore Roosevelt Speigner was a trailblazer in more than one way. He was the first Black man elected to the school board in Durham, North Carolina. Bolstered by a pioneering U-M doctorate, he was an advocate of teaching conservation well before the environmental movement of the 1970s took hold.
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