History
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March 28, 2022
Bentley launches African American Student Project
The Bentley Historical Library has launched a long-term project dedicated to highlighting the history of African Americans at U-M. The centerpiece is a database lof every African American student enrolled between 1853-1956.
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March 28, 2022
Heritage Project — Death of a president
On a Friday morning on the U-M campus in February 1925, eight young men made their way into the President’s House to accept a solemn invitation.
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March 21, 2022
Heritage Project — River rat
U-M scientist Elzada Clover and her graduate assistant, Lois Jotter, made history in 1938 by becoming the first known women to navigate the Colorado River.
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March 14, 2022
Heritage Project — Women apart
Where women students had once fended for themselves and mixed freely with men, by 1920 they lived in a segregated, regulated and tightly supervised sphere marked “Women Only.”
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March 7, 2022
Heritage Project — Madelon’s world
Madelon Stockwell stepped onto the Ann Arbor campus on a Wednesday, the second day of February 1870. Her arrival from Kalamazoo disrupted a world that had been wholly male since the fall of 1817.
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February 21, 2022
Heritage Project — ‘Lonely as Hell’
A white graduate student at U-M named John Behee explored how many Black athletes had played for U-M, and he found several of the 187 who lettered at U-M before 1972.
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February 14, 2022
Heritage Project — The Negro-Caucasian Club
Lenoir Bertrice Smith, a Black student, and her white friend Edith Kaplan, along with Oakley Johnson, a young instructor, gathered friends and declared themselves the Negro-Caucasian Club of U-M in 1925.
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February 7, 2022
Heritage Project — First in class
Orval Johnson was a Black student at a largely white university in 1948. Peter R. Elliott was the prototypical big man on campus, a member of two national championship teams.
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January 31, 2022
Heritage Project — Birds in the library
Frustrated by the lack of action taken by a books and research equipment committee in 1838, Regent Zina Pitcher acted on his own to get the university’s first library going.
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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.
