It Happened at Michigan

April 29, 2024
It Happened at Michigan — Family trees and the ‘striking incidence’ of cancer

For years, U-M pathologist Aldred Scott Warthin studied the lives — and deaths from cancer — of an extended Ann Arbor family.
April 22, 2024
It Happened at Michigan — College Republicans and their U-M roots

In mid-May of 1892, hundreds of students from universities around the country gathered on the U-M campus. When they departed it was as the newly christened American Republican College League, a national group that continues today as the College Republicans.
April 15, 2024
It Happened at Michigan — The ‘rare and curious’ Stearns Collection

Frederick Stearns had never purchased a musical instrument, but a small guitar caught his eye. It was called a quirten and dated to 1807.
April 8, 2024
It Happened at Michigan — The ‘harrowing experience’ of meeting Robert Frost

Robert Frost came to campus in the fall of 1921 to be U-M’s inaugural Creative Fellow in the Creative Arts, an experiment carried out by President Marion L. Burton.
April 1, 2024
It Happened at Michigan — ‘Michigan is not to be outdone’

When U-M established a course in the principles of aerodynamics in 1914, the seven young men who gathered before a professor in the West Engineering Building quietly made history.
March 18, 2024
It Happened at Michigan — Born to handle winning

When Jim Abbott pitched his first Little League game as an 11-year-old growing up in Flint, he fired a no-hitter. It was a glimpse of the extraordinary career to come.
March 11, 2024
It Happened at Michigan — Dr. Death comes to campus

Nicknamed “Dr. Death” early in his medical career because of his strong support of euthanasia, Jack Kevorkian was a 1952 graduate of the Medical School.
January 22, 2024
It Happened at Michigan — Racing to win a historic title

Orval Wardel Johnson, a member of the U-M track team, faced All-American quarterback Pete Elliott in a bid to serve as president of the LSA Class of 1949.
December 4, 2023
It Happened at Michigan — ‘You’ve got to be excellent’

Willie Hobbs first stepped foot on U-M’s campus as an 18-year-old first-year student in 1952. Twenty years later she was the first African American woman in the U.S. with a Ph.D. in physics.
November 20, 2023
It Happened at Michigan — ‘I’m just like everybody else’

Marina Oswald was left widowed when her husband was shot and killed in 1963. Two years later, she enrolled at U-M for classes at the English Language Institute.