History
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May 6, 2024
It Happened at Michigan — The university’s first gift, in 13 volumes
The first recorded gift from an individual to the university came from a well-to-do fur trader who never set foot in Ann Arbor.
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May 3, 2024
UM-Flint archive helps digitize historical Black newspapers
A collaboration involving UM-Flint’s Frances Willson Thompson Library and the Digital Collections Service at the U-M Library is digitizing Flint’s Black historical newspapers.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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April 8, 2024
Where’s Alice? The case of the missing statue
When U-M alumna Sheryl Szady stumbled across a bust sculpture in an Observatory Lodge Building conference room, she suspected it could be the culmination of a search that began three years earlier.
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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.
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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.
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March 25, 2024
It Happened at Michigan — Saving Michigan’s forests from ‘the most appalling consequences’
Volney M. Spalding, an 1873 U-M graduate who taught botany and zoology, worried about the fate of northern Michigan’s magnificent forests.
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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.
