Human Interest

The University of Chicago's original articles of incorporation, crafted in 1892, state that the institution will "provide, impart, and furnish opportunities for all departments of higher education to persons of both sexes on equal terms," thus writing coeducation into the University's founding principles.

"Printing for the Modern Age: Commerce, Craft, and Culture in the RR Donnelley Archive" explores the enormous impact that printing technology and print media have had on modern life. Materials in the exhibition are drawn from the RR Donnelley Archive, the historic corporate archive of R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, the Chicago-based firm that has become the largest provider of print and print-related products and services in the world.

Assembled over many years by Harry Sondheim, a University of Chicago alumnus (A.B. 1954, J.D. 1957), the Sondheim collection spans the 16th to the late 20th century and includes early printed books, prints, drawings, 19th- and 20th-century newspaper and magazine illustrations, and ephemeral items such as New Year cards and postcards depicting Jewish life and customs. In 2005, Mr. Sondheim began to present his collection to the University of Chicago in a series of gifts.

The Darwin Centennial Celebration, commemorating the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, was held at the University of Chicago from November 24 through November 28, 1959. Sol Tax, Professor of Anthropology, served as the chairman of the Centennial Committee. The interdisciplinary Centennial Committee also included Alfred E. Emerson (Department of Zoology), Chauncy D. Harris (Department of Geography), Everett E. Olson (Department of Geology), H. Burr Steinbach (Department of Zoology), and Ilza Veith (Medicine). The Darwin Centennial Celebration had several sponsors besides the University of Chicago, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

When Herman Poole “Sonny” Blount settled on Chicago’s South Side in 1946, he did so rather inconspicuously. Though studious and intelligent, Blount had dropped out of college. He had also spent some time in an Alabama prison for registering as a conscientious objector during World War II. Quiet, intellectual and somewhat eccentric, there was little to suggest that over the next two decades, Blount would become Sun Ra, one of jazz music’s most innovative and respected band leaders.

For over one hundred years, posters have acted as effective tools to disseminate various ideological messages during periods of revolution and war. Designed for mass distribution and aimed towards a large public audience, they embed social, political, and religious concerns that frequently are articulated through both text and image. Perhaps more so than at any other moment in recent history, posters served as powerful modalities for mobilization and communication during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88).

Tracking student life at the University of Chicago can be a daunting challenge. Today the University supports more than 300 Registered Student Organizations (RSOs). These groups provide a focus for an amazing range of student activities – community service, political advocacy, sports, fine arts, Greek life, cultural and ethnic associations, and spirituality, among others. Beyond the University RSOs, student life includes residence hall and apartment life, and extends to experiences across the neighborhood and city, whether in coffee shops and restaurants, galleries, volunteer agencies, political campaigns, or beyond.

The cookbook: its very name seems self-explanatory, yet this consistently practical genre is more challenging to delimit than the term suggests. In examining historical examples of cookbooks, one finds recipes for preparing specific dishes, but also encounters recipes for medicine and tonics, instructions on how to deliver babies, advice on how to remove stains from fabric and how best to black boots, warnings of moral failings among one's servants, and tips on fireplace maintenance.

Writing near the end of the first century B.C.E., Roman architect Vitruvius Pollio identified three elements necessary for a well-designed building: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas. Firmness or physical strength secured the building's structural integrity. Utility provided an efficient arrangement of spaces and mechanical systems to meet the functional needs of its occupants. And venustas, the aesthetic quality associated with the goddess Venus, imparted style, proportion, and visual beauty. Rendered memorably into English by Henry Wotton, a seventeenth century translator, “firmness, commodity, and delight” remain the essential components of all successful architectural design.

Souvenirs! Get Your Souvenirs! is the latest in an ongoing Special Collections archival series, Discover Hidden Archives Treasures. This installment focuses upon Chicago's two World's Fairs: the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the Century of Progress in 1933-1934.

For nearly 3,000 years, the Homeric epics have been among the best-known and most widely studied texts of Western civilization. Generations of students have read the Iliad and the Odyssey to learn Greek, to study Greek history, culture, and mythology, or for the sheer enjoyment of the stories and characters. Concepts such as heroism, nationalism, friendship, and loyalty have been shaped by Homer's works. Countless editions, translations, abridgements, and adaptations have appeared since the invention of printing, making Homer accessible to students, scholars, children, and general readers.

The centennial of the outbreak of World War I is an occasion for historical commemoration. Many of the decisive scenes of the Great War were enacted in the military theaters of the battlefield, but the impact of mobilization brought a significant social change to the home front as well. En Guerre: French Illustrators and World War I explores one of the most important of these cultural theaters of the war, the contest to influence public opinion and shape loyalties in one of the principal Allied powers. This exhibition examines a group of French artists whose work vividly expressed the partisanship, horror, valor, and absurdities of the war. Alternately promoting and critiquing the official narratives of the conflict, these French illustrators left an eloquent record of the ironies of the great international struggle and the uncertain rewards of victory.

This year the nation commemorates the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.  Born in Kentucky on February 12, 1809, raised in Indiana, and brought to national attention by his political career in Illinois, Lincoln was indelibly shaped by the traditions and values of the West.  In the decades following the trauma of the Civil War and the President's assassination, veneration of Lincoln became widespread in politics, popular culture, and intellectual life.  Nowhere was this impact more strongly felt than in Illinois, the state that Lincoln had called home.

We all know something about how this nation’s public schools were integrated. From Brown vs. Board of Education to the searing images from Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 and Boston in the 1970s, we follow a trail of icons to tell the tale.

The symbol of East European Jewry was an important tool of German-Jewish self-definition.  Were these so-called Ostjuden foreign or family?  Did they represent a tradition from which German Jews would have to dissociate in order to secure their civic equality as Germans, or were they fellow members of a single Jewish nation?  The stereotypes that German Jews attached to East European Jews reflect their own evolving self-perception and conflicting national aspirations.

On May 28, 1958, the Law School celebrated the groundbreaking of its new building on 60th Street with a ceremony and the laying of a cornerstone. This new building, designed by famed architect Eero Saarinen, was only the second permanent home of the Law School, which had been in Stuart Hall on the main University quad since 1904.

The Soviet Union was a world in pictures. Its creation in the wake of the Russian revolutions of February­–March and October–November 1917 was facilitated by a vibrant image culture based largely on new media technologies. Its periodic re-makings – during Stalin’s Great Leap Forward (1928–1932), World War II (1941–1945), the Thaw (1956–1964), Perestroika (1987­–1991) – were all accompanied by new media revolutions. Now, twenty years after the disappearance of the USSR, despite the decidedly mixed legacy of the Soviet experiment, the Soviet image continues to fascinate and to mystify.

year marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992) by University of Chicago art history professor Michael Camille (1958-2002). This groundbreaking work looked at the "lascivious apes, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somersaulting jongleurs to be found protruding from the edges of medieval buildings and in the margins of illuminated manuscripts." Camille studied the uncommon: the strange, remarkable, and extraordinary images at the edges of the medieval world, bringing to light to the confluence of the serious and the playful, the sacred and the profane.

Part of the underground movement established in the punk cultures of the 1970s, zines developed as an outlet for those on the outside of mainstream culture to express themselves.  Zines continued to be significant forms of expression in the punk cultures of the 1980s and 1990s; today zines provide an important platform for authors — or 'zinesters'— working within a distinct genre.

In his 1916 history of the University of Chicago's first quarter century, longtime Secretary of the Board of Trustees Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed accorded an esteemed status to its early donors. They resolutely stood by the institution, he wrote, as it "passed through periods of extraordinary difficulty and no small peril." While the University's shortcomings "tried [their] patience and tested [their] loyalty," he wrote, they still "carried it triumphantly through all its difficulties." 

Since the founding of the University of Chicago, Mexico has played a special role in the lives and research of some of the University's most significant scholars across a wide range of disciplines. Reflecting a nineteenth-century shift in emphasis from European studies to a focus on the Americas, many anthropologists, historians, and scientists turned their attention to Mexico; some were drawn by the chance to study the nation's large indigenous population, while others sought to confront its endemic diseases.