Open this book and step into the storied corridors of the nation’s oldest university; encounter the historic landmarks and curiosities; and among them, meet the famous dropouts and former students, the world-class scholars, eccentrics, and prodigies who have given the institution its incomparable character.

An alphabetical compendium of short but substantial essays about Harvard University—its undergraduate college and nine professional schools—this volume traverses the gamut of Harvardiana from Aab and Admissions to X Cage and Z Closet. In between are some two hundred entries written by three Harvard veterans who bring to the task over 125 years of experience within the university. The entries range from essential facts to no less interesting ephemera, from the Arnold Arboretum designed by Frederick Law Olmsted to the peculiar medical specimens of the Warren Museum; from Arts and Athletics to Towers and Tuition: from the very real environs (Cambridge, Charles River, and Quincy Street) to the Harvard of Hollywood and fiction.

Harvard A to Z is a browser’s delight, offering readers the chance to dip into the history and lore, the character and culture of America’s foremost institution of higher learning.

If Harvard can be said to have a literature all its own, then few universities can equal it in scope. Here lies the reason for this anthology—a collection of what Harvard men (teachers, students, graduates) have written about Harvard in the more than three centuries of its history. The emphasis is upon entertainment, upon readability; and the selections have been arranged to show something of the many variations of Harvard life.

For all Harvard men—and that part of the general public which is interested in American college life—here is a rich treasury. In such a Harvard collection one may expect to find the giants of Harvard’s last 75 years—Eliot, Lowell, and Conant—attempting a definition of what Harvard means. But there are many other familiar names—Henry Dunster, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Henry Adams, Charles M. Flandrau, William and Henry James, Owen Wister, Thomas Wolfe, John P. Marquaud. Here is Mistress Eaton’s confession about the bad fish served to the wretched students of Harvard’s early years; here too is President Holyoke’s account of the burning of Harvard Hall; a student’s description of his trip to Portsmouth with that aged and Johnsonian character, Tutor Henry Flynt; Cleveland Amory’s retelling of the murder of Dr. George Parkman; Mayor Quiney’s story of what happened in Cambridge when Andrew Jackson came to get an honorary degree; Alistair Cooke’s commentary on the great Harvard–Yale cricket match of 1951. There are many sorts of Harvard men in this book—popular fellows like Hammersmith, snobs like Bertie and Billy, the sensitive and the lonely like Edwin Arlington Robinson and Thomas Wolfe, and independent thinkers like John Reed. Teachers and pupils, scholars and sports, heroes and rogues pass across the Harvard stage through the struggles and the tragedies to the moments of triumph like the Bicentennial or the visit of Winston Churchill.

And speaking of visits, there are the visitors too—the first impressions of Harvard set down by an assortment of travelers as various as Dickens, Trollope, Rupert Brooke, Harriet Martineau, and Francisco de Miranda, the “precursor of Latin American independence.”

For the Harvard addict this volume is indispensable. For the general reader it is the sort of book that goes with a good living-room fire or the blissful moments of early to bed.

In the early years of the twentieth century, President Charles William Eliot fought to keep Harvard from becoming a refuge for “the stupid sons of the rich.” A. Lawrence Lowell, a tireless builder, gave the modern University its physical structure. James Conant helped forge a wartime alliance of universities, industry, and government that sustained an astonishingly prosperous postwar epoch.

Their successors saw Harvard through the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, adapting the University’s programs and policies to the needs of a rapidly changing society, strengthening longstanding bonds with international institutions, and creating new ties to the cultures of Japan, China, and other Eastern nations.

In words and pictures, Harvard Observed documents the shaping of the singular institution that poet and essayist David McCord, a former Harvard Alumni Bulletin editor, called “the haven of scholars and teachers, the laboratory of scientists and technicians, the church of the theologian, the crow’s nest of the visionary, the courtroom of the law, the forum of the public servant. It is gallery, concert hall, and stage; the out-patient ward for the medical student, counting-house of the businessman, classroom of the nation, lecture platform for the visitor, library to the world; and…‘on of the great achievements of American democracy.’”

Depicting the evolution of twentieth-century Harvard in the broader context of national and world events, Harvard Observed has much to say and show about the academic rites, intellectual arguments, sexual mores, fads, and folklore that became touchstones for successive generations of Harvardians. Photographs, drawings, and paintings from the University’s vast archival collections and museums add a compelling visual dimension.

A university press is a curious institution, dedicated to the dissemination of learning yet apart from the academic structure; a publishing firm that is in business, but not to make money; an arm of the university that is frequently misunderstood and occasionally attacked by faculty and administration. Max Hall here chronicles the early stages and first sixty years of Harvard University Press in a rich and entertaining book that is at once Harvard history, publishing history, printing history, business history, and intellectual history.

The tale begins in 1638 when the first printing press arrived in British North America. It became the property of Harvard College and remained so for nearly half a century. Hall sketches the various forerunners of the “real” Harvard University Press, founded in 1913, and then follows the ups and downs of its first six decades, during which the Press published steadily if not always serenely a total of 4,500 books. He describes the directors and others who left their stamp on the Press or guided its fortunes during these years. And he gives the stories behind such enduring works as Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key, and Kelly’s Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings.

Since 1970 a medical sciences curriculum has been taught jointly by Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1978, a doctoral program was founded to prepare physical scientists and engineers to address research at the interface of technology and clinical medicine. This volume describes, analyzes, and evaluates those first 25 years of the largest lasting collaborative educational and research program between two neighboring research universities.

Containing introductory comments by the presidents of both institutions at the time of the inauguration of the program, this volume presents historiographic and autobiographical chapters by senior officials and faculty of both universities who helped to guide it through its first quarter century. Evaluation of the program and follow-up data on the first graduates are included as well. Courses are listed in the appendices, as are curricula, faculty, theses topics, and major research projects.

In the twentieth century, American mathematicians began to make critical advances in a field previously dominated by Europeans. Harvard’s mathematics department was at the center of these developments. A History in Sum is an inviting account of the pioneers who trailblazed a distinctly American tradition of mathematics—in algebraic geometry and topology, complex analysis, number theory, and a host of esoteric subdisciplines that have rarely been written about outside of journal articles or advanced textbooks. The heady mathematical concepts that emerged, and the men and women who shaped them, are described here in lively, accessible prose.

The story begins in 1825, when a precocious sixteen-year-old freshman, Benjamin Peirce, arrived at the College. He would become the first American to produce original mathematics—an ambition frowned upon in an era when professors largely limited themselves to teaching. Peirce’s successors—William Fogg Osgood and Maxime Bôcher—undertook the task of transforming the math department into a world-class research center, attracting to the faculty such luminaries as George David Birkhoff. Birkhoff produced a dazzling body of work, while training a generation of innovators—students like Marston Morse and Hassler Whitney, who forged novel pathways in topology and other areas. Influential figures from around the world soon flocked to Harvard, some overcoming great challenges to pursue their elected calling.

A History in Sum elucidates the contributions of these extraordinary minds and makes clear why the history of the Harvard mathematics department is an essential part of the history of mathematics in America and beyond.

Houghton Library—the primary repository for Harvard University’s rare books, manuscripts, and much more—celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2017. Houghton’s holdings span nearly the entire history of the written word, from papyrus to the laptop. This anniversary volume presents a snapshot of the unique items that fill the library’s shelves.

From miniature books composed by a teenage Charlotte Brontë to a massive medieval manuscript hymnbook; from the plays of Shakespeare to costume designs for Star Trek; and from the discoveries of Copernicus to the laptops of twenty-first century writers, the selections celebrate great achievements in many and diverse fields of human endeavor. For the first time, readers will be able to tour the Houghton Library collection—which draws thousands of visitors from around the world each year—from home, with full-color illustrations.