Yesterday’s News

From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine

Cartoon shows an audience viewing a 3D rendering of the Holland Tunnel, with a ship floating above it and a car emerging from one end

Illustration by Mark Steele

1930

The Harvard Engineering Society enjoys an illustrated address on the building and running of the first vehicular tunnel under the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey: the two-year-old Holland Tunnel, named for its first chief engineer, Clifford M. Holland ’05, S.B. ’06.

1940

The editors encourage readers to help the University Archives by clipping news of Harvard men, particularly from papers outside the Boston and New York areas: “the more obscure the man and the paper, the more useful the clipping.”

1945

Among the 189 degrees awarded at the close of winter term is the first posthumous A.B. for a student killed in action during the current war: Pfc. William Scoville Moore Jr., who died on a battlefield in France on Armistice Day 1944.

1955

Signs of spring: the Cambridge police begin a crackdown on the latest undergraduate vehicular craze—secondhand hearses. Local citizens, reports a spokesman, find them “depressing.”

1970

Despite limited publicity, note the editors, some 150 people turned up for the first meeting of the Harvard University Ecology Coalition in February. The loose union of campus groups “worrying …about the decline of our environment” made plans for teach-ins and other activities scheduled for April 21 and 22.

1995

Inaugurating its new business section, The New York Times reports publishers’ fevered efforts to find a new college-level introductory economics textbook, noting that Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw has received a $1.4-million advance for his nearly finished volume.

2005

The Corporation announces the divestment of stock holdings in PetroChina (which sought drilling rights in Sudan during the brutal war in Darfur) on the recommendation of its Committee on Shareholder Responsibility. Seniors Matthew Mahan and Brandon Terry had launched a campaign urging classmates to put their senior gift into an escrow account unless divestment occurred.

Click here for the March-April 2020 issue table of contents

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