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.
Carpenter in the Dream Factory

^“People love a touch of the risqué just as they love a cocktail before dinner.^”
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The playwright Avery Hopwood led a life of worldly riches and inner despair.
River Rat

^“Each moment might easily have been our last, but fortunately we were too busy to meditate upon our imminent untimely end.^”
– Professor Elzada Clover, 1938

When a pioneering botany professor set out to explore specimens along the Colorado River, she made discoveries of a different sort.

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