Past Stories

A collection of black-and-white photographs sat dormant for a decade. Then, the owner took a closer look, and wondered if those photos belonged at the Bentley.

Forgotten start dates. Varsity status denials. Archived records at the Bentley show how the U-M women’s ice hockey team has repeatedly been iced out.

Founded during the Great Depression, the Sunrise Cooperative Farm Community was created on a dream of equality. But as records reveal, the dream was short-lived.

John Nakamura was a smart, conscientious U-M student hoping to become a journalist. Then the United States entered World War II. His path was altered, but never his heart.

As the United States entered World War I, poet Angela Morgan picked up her pen. Her papers reveal the struggles she endured to change hearts and minds with the written word.

After a U-M student was killed in 1890, a psychic visited town claiming to be able to name the murderer.

Meet Kate Donovan, the director of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. She’s part of our new series about great archivists doing important work in the field.

An adult-education class brought Black history to life in a Depression-era Ann Arbor classroom.

What do you do when the descriptions of archival collections are outdated, even racist? A new initiative at the Bentley is tackling a strategic, long-term fix.

For both astronomers and the public, predicting the weather was long an impossible dream. That is, until U-M’s Detroit Observatory trained a man who created the weather forecast.