The Gates Unbarred traces the evolution of University Extension at Harvard from the Lyceum movement in Boston to its creation by the newly appointed president A. Lawrence Lowell in 1910. For a century University Extension has provided community access to Harvard, including the opportunity for women and men to earn a degree. In its storied history, University Extension played a pioneering role in American continuing higher education: initiating educational radio courses with Harvard professors in the late 1940s, followed by collegiate television courses for credit in the 1950s, and more recently Harvard College courses available online. In the 1960s a two-year curriculum was prepared for the U.S. nuclear navy ("Polaris University"), and in the early 1970s Extension responded to community needs by reaching out to Cambridge and Roxbury with special applied programs. This history is not only about special programs but also about remarkable people, from the distinguished members of the Harvard faculty who taught evenings in Harvard Yard to the singular students who earned degrees, ranging from the youngest ALB at age eighteen, to the oldest ALB and ALM recipients, both aged eighty-nine--and both records at Harvard University.
"In Yards and Gates, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and her contributors argue that there have always been women at Harvard. The illuminating essays, letters, diary entries, and illustrations in this groundbreaking collection look at Harvard history from the colonial period to the present, giving primary attention to women and especially to the history of Radcliffe. They also demonstrate the value of looking at American history through a gendered lens. Here are stories about aspiration as well as marginality, and about women and men who opened once locked gates."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Offering the complete, never-before-told story of the twenty-five gates that form portals to Harvard Yard, this beautiful gift book recounts the aesthetic vision for America's preeminent university, developed by renowned architecture firm McKim, Mead & White. The book discusses the architectural intentions of the gates, as well as the human drama behind their fruition—tales of wealth, power, and institutional and personal ambition. Illustrated with previously unpublished sketches by Roger Erickson, architect and landscape architect; stunning color photographs of each gate by Ralph Lieberman; and a beautiful hand-drawn three-dimensional aerial map of Harvard Yard that denotes the location of each gate by RISD graduate student Christopher Beck.
The untold story of the Harvard class of '63, whose Black students fought to create their own identities on the cusp between integration and affirmative action. In the fall of 1959, Harvard recruited an unprecedented eighteen "Negro" boys as an early form of affirmative action. Four years later they would graduate as African Americans. Some fifty years later, one of these trailblazing Harvard grads, Kent Garrett, would begin to reconnect with his classmates and explore their vastly different backgrounds, lives, and what their time at Harvard meant. Garrett and his partner Jeanne Ellsworth recount how these eighteen youths broke new ground, with ramifications that extended far past the iconic Yard. By the time they were seniors, they would have demonstrated against national injustice and grappled with the racism of academia, had dinner with Malcolm X and fought alongside their African national classmates for the right to form a Black students' organization. Part memoir, part group portrait, and part narrative history of the intersection between the civil rights movement and higher education, this is the remarkable story of brilliant, singular boys whose identities were changed at and by Harvard, and who, in turn, changed Harvard.
Rising stars in Boston's design scene, architects Eric Howeler and J. Meejin Yoon have in a single decade developed a reputation for radical experiments in architectural form. Their design methodology--what they call an "expanded practice"--combines intense research with interdisciplinary experimentation. Howeler and Yoon's sensational, competition-winning lighting entry for the 2004 Athens Olympics exemplifies their fearless approach: without any prior experience in public space interactive design, the firm constructed a luminous, interactive soundscape installation at the base of the Acropolis. White Noise White Light featured a field of semiflexible fiber-optic strands that emitted white light and white noise in response to the movement of pedestrians. The project, an enormous success, enchanted a multitude of visitors who moved amidst the cilia of light. Expanded Practice presents twenty-nine recent projects by this young firm encompassing a broad range of scales and media. The projects, divided into distinct but often overlapping research themes, include a museum courtyard program inspired by the Voronoi cell-packing algorithm (PS1 Loop); an outdoor light installation featuring hovering cones that capture and interact with solar energy, rainwater, and sound (Hover); a garment designed to turn inside out as it unravels (Mobius Dress); and a landscape design that weaves technology and texture into an integrated and interactive landscape (Tripanel). Packed with drawings, diagrams, and photographs of each project's design process, Expanded Practice provides an inspirational look into one of the most exciting young firms working in architecture today.
In a book deeply impressive in its reach while also deeply embedded in its storied setting, bestselling historian Douglass Shand-Tucci explores the nature and expression of sexual identity at America's oldest university during the years of its greatest influence. The Crimson Letter follows the gay experience at Harvard in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing upon students, faculty, alumni, and hangers-on who struggled to find their place within the confines of Harvard Yard and in the society outside. Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde were the two dominant archetypes for gay undergraduates of the later nineteenth century. One was the robust praise-singer of American democracy, embraced at the start of his career by Ralph Waldo Emerson; the other was the Oxbridge aesthete whose visit to Harvard in 1882 became part of the university's legend and lore, and whose eventual martyrdom was a cautionary tale. Shand-Tucci explores the dramatic and creative oppositions and tensions between the Whitmanic and the Wildean, the warrior poet and the salon dazzler, and demonstrates how they framed the gay experience at Harvard and in the country as a whole. The core of this book, however, is a portrait of a great university and its community struggling with the full implications of free inquiry. Harvard took very seriously its mission to shape the minds and bodies of its charges, who came from and were expected to perpetuate the nation's elite, yet struggled with the open expression of their sexual identities, which it alternately accepted and anathematized. Harvard believed it could live up to the Oxbridge model, offering a sanctuary worthy of the classical Greek ideals of male association, yet somehow remain true to its legacy of respectable austerity and Puritan self-denial. The Crimson Letter therefore tells stories of great unhappiness and manacled minds, as well as stories of triumphant activism and fulfilled promise. Shand-Tucci brilliantly exposes the secrecy and codes that attended the gay experience, showing how their effects could simultaneously thwart and spark creativity. He explores in particular the question of gay sensibility and its effect upon everything from symphonic music to football, set design to statecraft, poetic theory to skyscrapers. The Crimson Letter combines the learned and the lurid, tragedy and farce, scandal and vindication, and figures of world renown as well as those whose influence extended little farther than Harvard Square. Here is an engrossing account of a university transforming and transformed by those passing through its gates, and of their enduring impact upon American culture.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, AND BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER • One of the most acclaimed books of our time: an unforgettable memoir about a young woman who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University “Extraordinary . . . an act of courage and self-invention.”—The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • BILL GATES’S HOLIDAY READING LIST • FINALIST: National Book Critics Circle’s Award In Autobiography and John Leonard Prize For Best First Book • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award • Los Angeles Times Book Prize Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home. “Beautiful and propulsive . . . Despite the singularity of [Westover’s] childhood, the questions her book poses are universal: How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?”—Vogue NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • Time • NPR • Good Morning America • San Francisco Chronicle • The Guardian • The Economist • Financial Times • Newsday • New York Post • theSkimm • Refinery29 • Bloomberg • Self • Real Simple • Town & Country • Bustle • Paste • Publishers Weekly • Library Journal • LibraryReads • Book Riot • Pamela Paul, KQED • New York Public Library
Aaron Greenspan was just like any other recent Harvard graduate until the day he read that his invention, a web site called The Facebook, was worth billions of dollars¿and someone else was taking the credit. Trying to find the rationale behind an unbelievable tale of ingenuity, triumph and betrayal, Greenspan sat down to write his story, and emerged with a tale that follows a boy and his autistic brother from public school to the hyper-competitive college admissions process to the gates of Harvard Yard and beyond. A true story that sheds light on the American educational system, the immense challenges of coping with autism, and of course, the astronomical growth of The Facebook, Authoritas is an engrossing account of life that any student, parent, teacher or entrepreneur will relate to.
Traces the tragedy-marked 1856 journey of three thousand Mormons from Iowa to Utah, explaining how leader Brigham Young disregarded warnings and then convinced his followers that hardships and deaths were part of a higher plan.
"This is a book about the things that inspire all of us, from the sacred to the profane, from everyday objects like a marble or a rubber stamp, to the more surprising such as a dirt pile or a turtle tail. Artists, writers, designers, among many others, contribute their objects and ruminations that encourage, motivate, and energize their own creativity."--Provided by publisher.
