The Netflix limited series Transatlantic tells the story behind a rescue operation to help artists, intellectuals, writers and other blacklisted individuals escape from Nazi-occupied Europe. This fictionalized account, inspired by the historical novel The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer, focuses on the work by the real Emergency Rescue Committee and its agent in Marseilles (also […]
What’s Cooking at Columbia: A Recipe Book
In 1942, the Columbia University Committee for War Relief published a recipe book containing the favorite dishes of Columbia’s faculty, entitled What’s Cooking at Columbia. The book sold for one dollar at the campus bookstore and according to the student newspaper, The Daily Spectator, all proceeds from the book went “to help cook Hitler’s goose.” […]
Jack Kerouac: #DormLife in 1940
In the semi-autobiographical novel Vanity of Duluoz, Jack Kerouac talks about his days as a student and football player at Columbia in 1940. It was in his dorm room in Livingston Hall (now Wallach) that Kerouac had the quintessential collegiate moment. […]
Description and digitization of the George Hunt Kwak’wala ethnographic manuscripts
Starting in 1913 and over the course of his life, anthropologist Franz Boas gifted stacks of handwritten manuscripts to Columbia University. Boas founded the Department of Anthropology at Columbia in 1902, and is hailed as the father of the ‘four-field’ approach of anthropology in North America (i.e. socio-cultural, linguistic, physical, and archaeological anthropology). His work […]
Engineering Women: “Firsts”
Columbia College did not admit women students until 1983 for its first coeducational class, the Class of 1987. But that did not mean that there were no women undergraduate students at Columbia. Both the School of Engineering and General Studies were already co-ed. And in the 1970s, three women engineering students were claiming firsts and […]