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An American University: An Audio Portrait of Princeton in 1946
By: Abbie Minard ’20 Abbie Minard ’20 is a history concentrator with a primary interest in early American history. On campus, she is a research associate at the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, music director and a DJ at WPRB, artistic director of the TapCats (tap dancing group), and a member of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra.…
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“A Tribute to Brian Taylor ’84”
By Justin Feil In honor of the first men’s basketball home game tonight, we pay homage to one of the Tiger court’s greatest. It was big news when Brian Taylor ‘84 (originally Class of 1973) chose to play basketball for Princeton University. It was bigger news when he became the first Princeton player, and one…
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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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Happy Birthday, Mudd!
When Princeton University dedicated the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library in mid-October 1976, University Librarian Richard W. Boss called the $2.5 million expenditure in times of economic uncertainty “a sassy act of faith,” especially given that the materials it housed were only drawing approximately 250 visitors per year. In 1976, Princeton expressed the hope that building…
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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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“The Man Who Was Right Too Soon”: Nuclear Test Ban film
By Sarah Robey [We recently digitized a campaign film from the Adlai E. Stevenson Papers, located in our Public Policy Papers. The film, “Nuclear Test Ban,” was produced as a televised campaign program for Stevenson’s 1956 presidential bid against Dwight D. Eisenhower. The film speaks to an important transitional moment in the American encounter with nuclear…
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Lost and Found: Segregation and the South
By Dan Linke and Brenda Tindal A recently donated film long thought lost has been digitized and is now viewable online. “Segregation and the South,” a film produced in 1957 by the Fund for the Republic, reported on race issues in the South since the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. Board of…
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1993 Baccalaureate Speaker Garry B. Trudeau
On Sunday June 6th,1993 at 2pm students were seated in the University Chapel to hear the remarks of Baccalaureate speaker Garry B. Trudeau, cartoonist and creator of Doonesbury. Trudeau was also the first person to receive a Pulitzer for a comic strip. This film shows some of the only documentation of the 1993 Baccalaureate ceremony…
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Princeton’s 250th Anniversary Commencement with speaker President Bill Clinton
On June 6th, 1996, as part of the University’s 250th Anniversary celebration, U.S. President Bill Clinton delivered the principal address at the 249th Commencement ceremonies, a departure from the Princeton tradition of having the University President deliver the ceremony’s major remarks. The video includes the entire commencement program starting with the procession (00:02), then the…
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