Old School

  1. August 13, 2018

    Angell’s diplomatic journey to China

    U-M President James Burrill Angell once played a crucial role in negotiating two treaties with China — an immigration treaty at the behest of the U.S. government, and a second trade treaty drafted by the Chinese, which in part enacted an absolute ban on Chinese-American commerce in opium.

  2. July 23, 2018

    Failed predictions

    Albert Porta, a professor of civil engineering at Santa Clara College in California, developed a weather and earthquake forecasting service. Despite media perceptions, he never served on the U-M faculty, but a U-M professor and The Michigan Daily ultimately cast doubt on Porta’s cataclysmic predictions.

  3. July 2, 2018

    After loss, a medical journey begins

    Built in 1926 by famous architect Albert Kahn, the Thomas Henry Simpson Memorial Institute for Medical Research on Observatory Street was the result of a $400,000 bequest by Christine Simpson of Detroit. Her gift stipulated that the institute should be primarily devoted “to the study of pernicious anemia.”

  4. June 25, 2018

    The legendary ‘Cat Hole’

    Along Washtenaw Avenue toward the sharp bend into Huron Street is the site of a long-lost Ann Arbor landmark known to generations of Michigan students and staff as the Cat Hole.

  5. June 11, 2018

    The president and the photographer

    As a U-M student, Margaret Bourke-White’s interest in photography was encouraged by Professor Alexander Ruthven. She would go on to become a legendary news photographer and he would later become the university’s seventh president. Their friendship would last for nearly 50 years.

  6. May 7, 2018

    U-M’s jazz paradise

    In 1894, U-M alumnus and regent Levi Lewis Barbour donated a patch of property along Woodward Avenue in Detroit. After forgoing plans to build a luxury apartment building on the site, the university sublet the property, leading to the eventual construction of the Graystone Ballroom.

  7. April 30, 2018

    Michigan in Detroit

    Close to the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Detroit Public Library in downtown Detroit is U-M’s Rackham Educational Memorial. Built in 1941, the building is noteworthy for its reliefs crafted by acclaimed Michigan sculptor Marshall Fredericks.

  8. April 23, 2018

    Cadaver collector

    Gregor “Doc” Nagele was a janitor at the U-M Medical School from 1849-1900. His official duties consisted of ringing the bell to awaken students, however his more important and surreptitious role was to collect cadavers for use by the Medical School.

  9. April 16, 2018

    Women’s Studies

    The first women’s studies course at U-M, one of the first of its kind in the country, was organized by a group of volunteer female professors in 1971.

  10. April 6, 2018

    Feminine ideal

    Alumna Marian Van Tuyl is “perhaps the only Michigan student ever depicted in a permanent piece of campus architecture.”