Harlem Renaissance Artist Charles Henry Alston

In 2018, Columbian Denise Murrell GSAS PhD 2014 was the curator of the Wallach Art Gallery’s “Posing modernity : the black model from Manet and Matisse to today.” Following this well-received show, her latest exhibition, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on February 25, 2024. Among the many […]

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Mary Leticia Caldwell and Marie Maynard Daly

Marie Maynard Daly, who received her PhD in chemistry from Columbia in 1947, is considered the first Black woman in the U.S. to earn a PhD in chemistry. At Columbia, Daly was one of the 18 graduate students who completed their degrees under Prof. Mary Leticia Caldwell’s sponsorship. Caldwell herself was also a “first.” In […]

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Lewis A. Rosenthal Memorial Room Plaque

Have you ever wondered who else lived in “your” dorm room? Some Columbia students have been visited by returning alumni (see Art Garfunkle); others could search student directories and other sources available at the University Archives. But for a select few, from around the 1930s to the 1970s, there was a plaque right in their […]

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Seth Low and The Gilded Age

The second season of Julian Fellow’s The Gilded Age on Max followed the lives of New Yorkers and Brooklynites in 1883. This season viewers learned about the fight to save the “colored schools” in New York, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, and even a visit to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Connected to all […]

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Institutional Research Data from the 1960s

The term institutional research data was not in use in 1960, but that is exactly what Director of University Planning Stanley Salmen was collecting and studying. In a recently discovered set of boxes, we found a number of binders from Salmen’s office.  Labeled as “Course Study,” these binders hold enrollment numbers, tuition data, faculty salaries […]

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