Arts & Culture

When you graduate from a University that counts dozens of U.S. presidents and Supreme Court justices — and hundreds of distinguished scholars, scientists, and Nobel Prize winners — among its alumni, it is easy, even for the most accomplished and talented, to slip through the cracks into obscurity. One such alumnus whose reputation has fallen victim to time and fashion is the painter Washington Allston, perhaps the most famous Harvard graduate you’ve never heard of.

Carl Linnaeus believed that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was not an apple but a banana. He came to this conclusion in 1737, while studying plant specimens at Hartecamp, the estate of George Clifford, a wealthy Dutch banker and director of the Dutch East India Company. Clifford collected exotic plants from around the world and had succeeded in getting a banana plant to flower and bear fruit in his greenhouse. Linnaeus’ belief in the theological significance of the banana is enshrined in the name he gave it: Musa paradisiaca.

More than 30 years after its enactment, Title IX is still a topic of hot debate.

On Oct. 19 at the Memorial Church, while a heavy rain pelted down outside, Marian Wright Edelman pelted a near-capacity audience with facts about America’s social failings. An American child is abused or neglected every 36 seconds, said the founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, and every 42 seconds a child is born without health care.

When the 11th hour struck on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the four-year nightmare of World War I — “The Great War” — officially ended. The world awoke to find some 22 million dead and a like number physically wounded. Never before had any generation witnessed such concentrated death and destruction. In celebration of its 75th anniversary, the Memorial Church will host the following special events and services over the coming weeks.

Harvard President Drew Faust was about to cut the giant ribbon stretched across the stage of the New College Theatre when a shrill voice called out from the back of the audience:

Medieval history comes to lyrical life at Harvard as musicians perform an 800-year-old Ambrosian liturgical chant recently indetified in Harvard’s Houghton Library.

The Humanities Center at Harvard recently announced the inauguration of a postdoctoral fellowship program. The first class of fellows, who will be in residence for the 2008-09 year, includes two American and two German scholars.

Acclaimed actor, producer, and director Andy Garcia was honored by the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations on a recent (Oct. 16) visit to the University. The special invited guest was recognized for his work with at-risk youth and people with cancer. Garcia is the director of the feature film “The Lost City,” in which he co-stars with Bill Murray and Dustin Hoffman, and which was shown at a special Brattle Theatre screening on the evening of the actor’s visit.

Legendary film star and patron of the arts Robert Redford came to the Harvard Film Archive (HFA) last week (Oct. 11) for a sneak preview of “Lions for Lambs,” which Redford directed and which stars Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise. Redford was joined at the HFA by fellow cast members Michael Pena and Andrew Garfield, who took part in a panel discussion following the screening of the film.

The New College Theatre has yet to see its first performance, but already the building seems to echo with audience laughter and the pleasant dissonance of a tuning orchestra. In the lobby, one can almost hear a whisper of “break a leg” or the clink of glasses at a postproduction fête rising faintly from the polished wooden floorboards. More than 100 years of theatrical history live on in the New College Theatre, and a special exhibition now on display throughout the building will help to preserve that legacy.

Is America on the verge of an explosion of “girl power” — a new level of female leadership in public life?

In 1973, the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, ruled that the U.S. Constitution protects a woman’s right to an abortion. But where did that right come from? The Constitution…

Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language, according to a formula developed by Harvard University mathematicians who’ve invoked evolutionary principles to study our language over the past 1,200 years, from “Beowulf” to “Canterbury Tales” to “Harry Potter.”

Harvard’s newest space dedicated to the performing arts, the New College Theatre — formerly the site of the Hasty Pudding Theatre, located at 10-12 Holyoke St. — will open this fall under the auspices of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and managed by the Office for the Arts at Harvard (OFA).

Medieval history comes to life at Harvard University on Oct. 18, when students and guest musicians collaborate in the North American premiere of an 800-year-old chant repertory from Harvard’s Houghton Library.

Harvey Mansfield wants to reintroduce the concept of thumos into political science. As employed by Plato and Aristotle, thumos refers to the “part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance.” Mansfield believes that modern political science has excluded thumos, and as a result has narrowed its understanding of what politics is really about.

The historical two-day celebration of Drew Faust’s inauguration as the president of Harvard began Thursday (Oct. 11) on a literary note. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison read from a work-in-progress…

A muster of remarkable musicians who also happen to be Harvard graduates gathered in Sanders Theatre Thursday night (Oct. 11) to serenade the soon-to-be inaugurated University President Drew Faust. The…

A masinko is about as simple as a stringed instrument can get — a wooden box with a neck protruding from one corner and a single string stretched across its face. The one Setegn Atanaw plays is the amplified version, airbrushed in red and yellow like a Fender Stratocaster.

An exhibition opens at the Fogg Art Museum this Saturday (Oct. 6) that will have lots of people talking.

Plaster reproductions of Maya and Aztec carvings, which preserve precious details now lost on the originals, are leaving dusty, haphazard storage for cleaning, cataloging, and crating that will prepare them for a new era of usefulness and relevance.

By all accounts, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a funny man with a wide-ranging, brilliant, synthesizing mind. At the same time, many of his friends say, he had a gift for dramatic language that sometimes overshadowed his true intentions.

Before he was a United States senator from New York, before he was ambassador to India, before he taught government at Harvard, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) served as assistant secretary of labor under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and it was in that capacity that he issued a report in March 1965 titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”

In conjunction with the Oct. 12 inauguration of Drew Faust as president of Harvard, the Harvard University Archives has developed two special exhibitions that highlight the history of Harvard, its governance, and its presidency.

For artists of the Renaissance, the key to truth and beauty lay in the past. Renaissance artists assiduously studied the sculptures and monuments of Greece and Rome and emulated them in their own work. The inspiration they found in those ancient models has echoed down the centuries, influencing the appearance of Western art and architecture to this day.

It’s been half a century, but it feels like just yesterday for at least one member of the “Little Rock Nine.” “I can’t feel this so strong, it doesn’t make sense … you are supposed to be over it,” says an emotional Minnijean Brown Trickey in the opening of the film “Little Rock Central High: 50 Years Later,” as she walks the grounds in front of the historic Arkansas site. The school was at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement.

Headed by University of Guelph English professor Ajay Heble, the international “Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice” project recently secured a $2.5 million grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Harvard affiliates Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African-American Music, and Jason Stanyek, visiting associate professor of music, are among the project’s research collaborators. All told, researchers representing 18 universities from across North America, Europe, and Australia will work as co-investigators on the seven-year initiative.

The Harvard Map Collection’s atlases of historic Cambridge have much to reveal about the city and the University’s past. Looking at these oversized documents one learns, for instance, that 135 years ago, Harvard students boarded their horses in the University stables where the current-day John Harvard’s Brew House operates, and that, as of 1903, the John Harvard statue sat not outside University Hall but by Memorial Hall. Now the Map Collection has made it easier for those researching local history to use its Boston and Cambridge atlases by digitizing these volumes and making them available online to the public.

From the New Left to the sexual revolution, scholarship on 1960s America has focused primarily on social protest and the counterculture. Now, John McMillian, a lecturer on history and literature, plans to expand how we think about one of the nation’s most complex and colorful eras.