Author: staraba

By Suzy Taraba '77, MALS ’10, Director of Special Collections & Archives Paula Beer-Hofmann, the wife of the Austrian dramatist and poet Richard Beer-Hofmann, died in Switzerland on October 30, 1939, as she and her …

Who remembers Foss House? And what about the Art Lab? Appropriately located on Foss Hill, Foss House was once the home of Archibald Foss, Class of 1852, professor of Latin and Hebrew and brother of Wesleyan President Cyr…

Did you ever wonder what Wesleyan was like more than 140 years ago? Find yourself daydreaming about what students of the time thought of the brand new buildings on College Row or the fledgling sport of “base ball”? Perha…

Wesleyan graduates have a long tradition of founding educational institutions. Some were established to help right social wrongs. The Colored Normal School in Richmond, Va., the first public high school for African Ameri…

Did you know that Wesleyan owns one of the country’s most complete collections of William Butler Yeats? Also in Special Collections & Archives in Olin Library, you’ll find more than 30 different editions of Walt Whit…

The new College of the Environment stands firmly on the foundation of nearly 180 years of science at Wesleyan. From its beginning in 1831, the natural sciences have been a key part of the University’s curriculum. Early s…

Trick question: What do the 18th-century British legal reformer Lord Mansfield, migratory birds, the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Prohibition repeal in the United States have to do with each other? Answer: All can be studie…

For most of Wesleyan’s first century and a half, the issue of whether men and women should be educated together seemed to be considered in forty–year time periods. From 1831 to 1871, all male. From 1872 to 1912, coeducat…

Imagine a Wesleyan without academic departments based on traditionally recognized disciplines. Students (perhaps even faculty) live, eat, study, and socialize together in groups organized around intellectual interests. F…