Yesterday’s News

Headlines from Harvard’s history

Illustration by Mark Steele

1918

Between July 1 and August 12, the Harvard Reserve Officers’ Training Corps prepares almost 600 men (about half undergraduates) for military service.

1938

At the fifth annual joint outing of the Harvard and Yale Clubs of New York City, at the Rockaway Hunting Club, Cedarhurst, Long Island, Harvard wins the baseball game 4-0, loses the golf match 427 to Yale’s 409, and wins the tennis competition five matches to none.

1943

The Harvard Advocates president announces that lack of finances and manpower make its forthcoming issue the last “for the duration,” though the organization will continue its “social function.”

1953

Assistant professor of anatomy Helen Dean Markham, suspended in June by the Corporation on suspicion of being a Communist, has her suspension lifted on August 31, but the Corporation states that she will not be rehired when her current appointment ends on June 30, 1954.

The School of Public Health has air-freighted a library of “more than 300 texts and reference works on public health and preventive medicine” to the first school of public health to be established in South Korea.

1968

President Pusey refuses to allow the Boston Patriots to play regularly in Harvard Stadium because “professional football [cannot be] introduced into an academic environment without…exerting a disruptive and disturbing influence….”

1973

Two major construction projects keep the Yard bustling: the demolition of Hunt Hall to make room for the future Canaday Hall, and the excavation of the site for Pusey Library.

1998

On July 4, the day Henry David Thoreau, A.B. 1837, matriculated at Walden Pond, 100 naturalists—including the day’s other honoree, Pellegrino University Research Professor E.O. Wilson—descend on Concord and Lincoln, Massachusetts, in what is labeled “the world’s first 1,000-species Biodiversity Day.” The 24-hour event turns up a species total tentatively set at 1,620. 

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