Past Stories

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What do you do when the descriptions of archival collections are outdated, even racist?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.

Belford Lawson’s work as a lawyer and activist changed the course of civil rights in the United States. His incredible story is told, in part, through archived materials at the Bentley. 

Women at U-M fought to have athletic facilities where they could exercise and play sports, same as the men. The battle highlights the ways in which women had to carve out spaces for themselves on campus time and again.

One researcher’s quest to resurrect a nearly extinct strain of rye seed started in the archives but quickly expanded to seed banks, national parks, a whiskey distillery, and beyond.

Thousands of historical photos will soon be available digitally as part of a new effort to better serve local communities.

In 1961, the Kennedy Administration sent the U-M Symphony Band to the Soviet Union in hopes of thawing relations between the two countries through the common language of music.