Yesterday’s News

From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine

1919 

With the War Department’s approval, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences votes to resume military training at Harvard, with courses “tuned up to the same [scholastic] standard” as others in the curriculum and military drills to be conducted at summer camps, not on campus.

1929 

For Radcliffe’s semicentennial celebration from May 30 to June 1, “the vicinity of Memorial Hall [is] thronged with delegates wearing gaily colored academic costumes”; Mrs. Herbert Hoover brings greetings from the White House; and President Lowell offers the congratulations of Harvard.

1934 

The baseball team accepts an invitation to play 12 Japanese college teams over the summer, thereby becoming the first Harvard team and “the first [college] squad from the effete East to carry its bats to the Far East.”

1939 

Competing under cover, Edward C.K. Read ’40, president of the Lampoon, wins the annual Wellesley College hoop race, a tradition alleged to determine which member of the graduating class will be married first. According to the Alumni Bulletin, Read reportedly “had accomplices ‘within the ranks’ who fitted him out with the necessary feminine paraphernalia and slipped him into the starting line-up.”

1944 

Instructor in chemistry Robert B. Woodward and Polaroid Corporation researcher William von E. Doering ’38, Ph.D. ’43, working together in the University laboratories, have succeeded in synthesizing quinine.

1989 

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences celebrates its centennial on June 2 and 3 with symposia, receptions, and awards to several of its most distinguished alumni.

1999 

Harvard joins a yearlong monitoring project, initiated by Notre Dame, to gather information about the conditions inside apparel factories that make university insignia wear and to formulate ideas on how to improve them.

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