Heritage Project

June 20, 2022
Heritage Project — Blue angel

When he was 86 years old, Forman Brown walked into a gay bookstore in Los Angeles and asked a manager if the shop carried “Better Angel.” The manager handed Brown a copy of the novel. The book was well done, he told Brown, and quite popular. “I think you’ll like it.” “I’m sure I shall,” Brown replied. “You see, I wrote it.”
June 6, 2022
Heritage Project — The arsonist was a scholar

Robert H. Stacy wrote to U-M President Alexander G. Ruthven that he was being falsely accused of setting the fire that destroyed Haven Hall on June 6, 1950, and felt that his life’s goal of becoming a college professor was “all but destroyed.” Stacy would be proven wrong on both counts.
May 23, 2022
Heritage Project — The robber’s third chance

Right around Christmas 1950, a string of hold-ups was reported around Detroit. The culprit turned out to be 20-year-old James Minder, a very bright undergraduate in LSA.
May 2, 2022
Heritage Project — J-Hop’s rise and fall

Since its founding, the mid-year social event that became known as the Junior Hop, then simply and universally as J-Hop, had swelled into a glittering three-day-and-night festival.
April 25, 2022
Heritage Project — Professor White’s Diag

The Ann Arbor campus was barely 20 years old when Andrew Dickson White first saw it. He arrived from Yale in October 1857 to teach history and English literature.
April 18, 2022
Heritage Project — Earth Day eve

For a few days in March 1970, U-M hosted what may have been the most important single event in its history, an event that pushed on the wheel of history and launched the modern movement to save the planet from environmental disaster.
April 11, 2022
Heritage Project — Blinded by science

When Professor Edward Campbell lost his sight in an 1892 laboratory accident, only a tiny minority of blind adults in the nation was self-supporting.
April 4, 2022
Heritage Project — Carpenter in the Dream Factory

Avery Hopwood was a gay Midwesterner with a superb sense of humor who, in the span of a few months in 1905, wrote his first play, graduated from U-M and sold the play to a Broadway production company.
March 28, 2022
Heritage Project — Death of a president

On a Friday morning on the U-M campus in February 1925, eight young men made their way into the President’s House to accept a solemn invitation.
March 21, 2022
Heritage Project — River rat

U-M scientist Elzada Clover and her graduate assistant, Lois Jotter, made history in 1938 by becoming the first known women to navigate the Colorado River.