History

  1. November 7, 2022

    Heritage Project — Dr. Joy’s undoing

    By all signs, the future was very bright for Douglas Joy in the summer of 1881. By June 1882, Douglas Joy was fighting for his job and, more important, his reputation. 

  2. October 31, 2022

    Heritage Project — Mysteries at Michigan

    You may never have heard of the Michigan law professor who was baked to a crisp in the oven of the Lawyers Club kitchen. Or the English professor presumed dead when his face suddenly went missing.

  3. October 24, 2022

    Heritage Project — Tom Harmon is missing

    Three years after accepting the Heisman Trophy as the best college football player in the land, Tom Harmon and his World War II fighter plane were shot down.

  4. October 17, 2022

    Heritage Project — Lost campus

    Every alumnus carries a cherished memory of Michigan — then returns in 20 years and realizes that “my Michigan” is hard to find among the new construction of someone else’s Michigan.

  5. October 10, 2022

    Heritage Project — In the face of fascists

    In the summer of 1936, a procession of scholars — including a junior professor from U-M — crossed the main plaza of the University of Heidelberg to celebrate the 550th anniversary of one of the great universities of Europe.

  6. October 3, 2022

    Heritage Project — Depression generation

    The Great Depression tore a hole in the University of Michigan, and students who went to college in the 1930s lived in a realm of scarcity and fear.

  7. September 26, 2022

    Egypt’s mysteries, surprises provide powerful pull

    Richard Redding, associate research scientist in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, has spent nearly every winter in Egypt for about 30 years uncovering the mysteries of the Old Kingdom.

  8. September 26, 2022

    Heritage Project — The first freshmen

    Their names are nowhere on the U-M campus. But in 1841 they did what no other young person had ventured to do in Ann Arbor. These six young, white males enrolled.

  9. September 19, 2022

    Heritage Project — A different Diag

    One day in June long ago, two lawyers and a politician were given the job of recommending exactly where to build the campus of the new University of Michigan. They had two sites to look at, both of about 40 acres.

  10. September 12, 2022

    Heritage Project — End of ‘Hours’

    For more than a century, the university was every student’s mother and father. By law and by custom, the school operated in loco parentis – “in place of parents.”