Alice Louise Pond was not the first nor even the second woman to receive a Columbia diploma. Those honors belong to Winifred Edgerton, the first woman to receive a degree from Columbia, a PhD in Mathematics in 1886, and to Mary Parsons Hankey, who completed the Collegiate Course for Women and became the first woman […]
Category: Columbia University Archives
Low Library by Cake Man Raven
All birthday parties need a cake and Columbia’s 250th Anniversary in 2003 was no different. Harlem native Patrick De’Shaun Dennis III, better known as Cake Man Raven, made a 13-foot-tall replica of Low Library in his signature flavor: red velvet. While this massive 3.5-ton cake was impressive, Cake Man Raven’s masterpiece was yet to come. […]
Extras Between The Sheets
The work of archival and rare book processors is truly fascinating and never-ending. At RBML, we take great pleasure in exploring beyond the obvious and discovering curious and surprising artifacts left behind between pages and amidst letters for years, decades, and even centuries. These treasures come in varying formats, subjects, and meanings, some of them […]
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 […]
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 […]