Endowed by Lucius Littauer, A.B. 1878, a school for public administration--Harvard's first interfaculty initiative--brings together experts from economics, government, law, and business. Its granite center opens in 1939.

The Nazis invade France and the Low Countries, prompting President James Bryant Conant '14, Ph.D. '16, to join the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. In a national radio address on May 29, he declares, "We must rearm at once." PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY HARVARD UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

Harvard, fully mobilized, becomes a year-round military training school, with musters on Soldiers Field and drills in the Old Yard. PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY HARVARD UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

Federally funded research by Harvard scientists produces napalm, the synthesis of quinine, advances in radar and sonar, and, under the leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer '26, a successful atomic bomb test at Alamogordo. Mark I, unveiled by Howard H. Aiken, Ph.D. '39, in 1944, is the precursor of digital computing. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY HARVARD UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

Winston Churchill receives an LL.D. at Sanders Theatre September 6. His address, broadcast nationwide, looks beyond the war. "The empires of the future," he promises, "are the empires of the mind." PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY HARVARD NEWS OFFICE

Speaking at Commencement, honorand George C. Marshall, newly appointed U.S. secretary of state, proposes a program for the economic reconstruction of Europe.

A signal transformation at Harvard--begun in 1943 when Radcliffe women are admitted to some Harvard College courses--accelerates as historian Helen Maude Cam becomes the University's first tenured woman.

Harvard goes modern, with the opening of Lamont Library and the Walter Gropius-designed graduate center. The latter's "world-tree" sculpture inspires Thomas A. Lehrer '47 to versify, "Of all the thoughts of Mr. Gropius/This cosmic hat rack is the dopius.

"Conant, president since 1933, steps down to become U.S. high commissioner to Germany. His successor, Nathan Marsh Pusey '28, Ph.D. '37, is Harvard's first president born west of the Connecticut River. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY INTERNATIONAL NEWS PHOTOS