University of Michigan Heritage

Birds in the Library

To have a great library, the fledgling University of Michigan needed a great book.

Even the common house wren became a figure of drama for Audubon, who showed a mother feeding a spider to her eager young.

John James Audubon showed birds as they seemed in life, frenetic or graceful, stealthy or soaring.

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The Negro-Caucasian Club

^“The colored were not part and parcel of the school.^”
– Joseph Leon Langhorne

In the 1920s, black and white students formed an association to promote interracial understanding—but the University resisted.
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^“The recent tendency to formalize social life at Michigan … strikes me as under-cutting the intellectual aspect of co-education.^”
– Alumna Ruth Weeks

Where the first women students had once mixed freely with men, their successors lived in a tightly supervised and segregated sphere.
The Arsonist Was a Scholar

^“He was at worst emotionally unstable. He was sort of a ‘lone duck,’ living all by himself.^”
– Warren E. Blake, classical studies professor

After burning down a campus building, an alumnus began life anew at another university.

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