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Lawrence Rauch *49 and Operation Crossroads: Atomic Testing at Bikini Atoll
By Rosalba Varallo Recchia This post is part of a series on education and war related to our current exhibition, “Learning to Fight, Fighting to Learn: Education in Times of War,” on display through June 2018. Please stop by to learn more. Lawrence Rauch *49, a mathematics graduate student and a research assistant in physics,…
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Great Scott! Look at All These Birds!
By Arthur Kim ’18 Until relatively recently, there were thousands of stuffed birds in Guyot Hall, which was once the home of Princeton’s Museum of Natural History. Most of these birds were collected by William Earl Dodge Scott, the former curator of the Department of Ornithology at Princeton University. Scott traveled throughout the country, studying…
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The Cat Telephone
By Arthur Kim ’18 What do a cat and a telephone have in common? They were the same thing in an experiment conducted in 1929 by Professor Ernest Glen Wever and his research assistant Charles William Bray here at Princeton University. Wever and Bray took an unconscious, but alive, cat and transformed it into a…
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Margaret Niemann Rost ’85 on Softball and the Senior Thesis
By Cailin Hong ’17 With the women’s softball season underway, Mudd reflects on the team’s not-so-humble origins with a retrospective on Margaret Niemann Rost ’85, former co-captain and one of the team’s first members after the fledgling sport was promoted to varsity status. Rost was a religion major from Ridgewood, New Jersey, who played on…
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Halle Berry on “Women, Race, and Film” (2000)
Fifteen years ago, Halle Berry made history as the first African American woman ever to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. A year and a half before her Oscar win, Halle Berry was the keynote speaker for a two-day conference at Princeton, “Imitating Life: Women, Race, and Film, 1932-2000.” We’ve recently digitized the video…
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Integrating Princeton University: Robert Joseph Rivers ’53
As we have previously pointed out, Princeton’s first African American undergraduates were not purposefully admitted: they were instead brought as part of a Navy training program during World War II. In 1945, Trustee Laurence G. Payson wrote to fellow member of the Class of 1916 John McFerran Barr to explain the presence of black students…
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Grading at Princeton University
We sometimes get questions about what people see in alumni files. One of the more challenging things about reading academic records is dealing with unfamiliar grading rubrics. For example, we shared F. Scott Fitzgerald’s grade card with you a while ago. Though a dropped semester and repeated classes would indicate he did not do so…
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“Climates of the Past”
These days, most Americans think of PBS when they think of educational television, but in the 1950s, viewers expected commercial networks to offer this sort of programming. In 1952, New York’s WNBT (NBC) offered Princeton University a grant for faculty to develop a variety of shows in their areas of expertise suitable for a mass…
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History of Women at Princeton University
Written by Vanessa Snowden For much of its history, Princeton University had the reputation of being an “old-boys’ school.” Starting in the fall of 1969, Princeton became co-educational, and nine women transferred into the Class of 1970, with slightly greater numbers in the two subsequent classes. Women who matriculated as freshmen in 1969 graduated in…
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