Heritage Project

  1. January 24, 2022

    Heritage Project — Fraternity war

    In the fall term of 1845, just four years after classes had begun at the University of Michigan, a junior named George Becker and several friends joined together to create U-M’s first fraternity.

  2. January 17, 2022

    Heritage Project — Just nuts

  3. January 10, 2022

    Heritage Project — The 1913 Lectern

    For more than 100 years, Hill Auditorium has been U-M’s most prestigious venue for rhetoric and debate. Speaker after speaker has gripped and pounded an oak lectern given by the Class of 1913.

  4. December 6, 2021

    Heritage Project — The campus at war

    In the days following the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, U-M students — both male and female — had decisions to make regarding their response to the United States entering World War II.

  5. November 22, 2021

    Heritage Project — The assassin’s widow

    Unable to speak much English but desiring to stay in the United States after her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed, Marina Oswald was invited to study at U-M’s English Language Institute.

  6. November 15, 2021

    Heritage Project — The law school goes under

    The architectural crown of U-M’s campus was the Law Quadrangle, and the jewel in that crown was the Law Library. Architect Gunnar Birkerts figured the only way to add space and not interfere with the building’s beauty was to go down.

  7. November 8, 2021

    Heritage Project — Dear Aunt Ruth

    Whether stationed stateside, recuperating in hospitals, or seeing action in Europe and the Pacific, students, faculty, staff and alumni serving in World War II could expect to hear news about Ann Arbor from Ruth Buchanan.

  8. November 1, 2021

    Heritage Project — The Prisoner’s Dilemma

    Robert Axelrod, today a professor emeritus in the Ford School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science, encountered the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a young man in the 1960s.

  9. October 25, 2021

    Heritage Project — Seeds of discontent

  10. October 18, 2021

    Heritage Project — The first flu shot

    With the United States on the brink of war and visions of the devastation wrought by the influenza pandemic during the first world war, U-M virologist Tommy Francis was assigned a monumental task.