History
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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.
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March 11, 2024
It Happened at Michigan — Dr. Death comes to campus
Nicknamed “Dr. Death” early in his medical career because of his strong support of euthanasia, Jack Kevorkian was a 1952 graduate of the Medical School.
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March 7, 2024
U-M part of multi-museum effort to scan natural history specimens
Natural history museums have entered a new stage of scientific discovery and accessibility after creating 3D reconstructions of vertebrate specimens and making them freely available online.
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March 4, 2024
It Happened at Michigan — Engineering a prominent career
George Maceo Jones earned three degrees from U-M over a decade. When he received his doctorate in 1934, he became the first African American man in the country with a Ph.D. in civil engineering.
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February 20, 2024
George Gershwin’s first musical rediscovered after nearly a century
Last summer, U-M researcher Jacob Kerzner uncovered the complete musical orchestration of “La, La, Lucille,” making the musical possible to perform for the first time in nearly a century.
