History

  1. March 20, 2023

    Heritage Project — The first teach-in

    In 1965, only a handful of students were radical in their politics. But the faculty included a scattering of progressives involved in the early stirrings of dissent against the Vietnam War. 

  2. March 13, 2023

    Heritage Project — Me Too, circa 1970

    A movement of sorts began at Jean Ledwith King’s modest house on the far west side of Ann Arbor early in 1970 when King and a handful of other women asserted that U-M should treat women the same as men.

  3. March 6, 2023

    Heritage Project — ‘Our brilliant Miss Sheldon’

    On her 21st birthday — Sept. 15, 1871 — a drizzly day in upstate New York, Mary Downing Sheldon boarded the train in her hometown of Oswego, secured her luggage and settled into her seat.

  4. February 13, 2023

    Heritage Project — ‘The dignity of man’

    Thirty-five years after receiving his medical degree from Michigan in 1931, Paul Cornely called on schools of public health to better prepare their graduates for addressing the health challenges facing African Americans. 

  5. February 6, 2023

    Heritage Project — Rhapsodies in blue

    The origins of U-M’s devotion to the color blue lie lost in the years before the Civil War. But a committee of students charged with choosing Michigan’s colors made their recommendation Feb. 12, 1867.

  6. February 2, 2023

    Fish preserves earliest fossilized brain of backboned animal

    A 319 million-year-old ray-finned fish fossil at U-M provides new information about early evolutionary history. The fossil was pulled from a coal mine in England more than a century ago.

  7. January 30, 2023

    Heritage Project — The Great Rush

    On Nov. 9, 1872, a squad of U-M medical students had been handed their hats in a rule-free game of football by a crowd of students from the Literary Department.

  8. January 23, 2023

    Heritage Project — The fake news about James Neel

    James van Gundia Neel died of cancer at his home in Ann Arbor on the first day of February 2000. He was 84. He was promptly memorialized as one of the greatest scientists in U-M’s history.

  9. January 16, 2023

    Heritage Project — No laughing matter

    “Tickled to Death,” a musical comedy written, staged and performed by U-M students, generated a buzz in the weeks before Christmas 1924.

  10. January 9, 2023

    Heritage Project — The scientist of peace

    J. David Singer was a pioneer in a new, scientific way of studying war, believing a way to lasting peace might be found if only humankind truly understood how war and peace are made.