To celebrate National Immigrant Heritage Month, we remember Michael Pupin, or Mihajlo Idvorsky Pupin, Columbia College Class of 1883, member of the Columbia faculty from 1890 until his death in 1935, and inventor of coils to facilitate long-distance telephone calls. […]
Tag: Columbia University
Mrs. Duer’s Diaries
In 1937, Alice Duer Miller, Barnard Class of 1899, presented to the Columbiana Collection the diaries of her great-grandmother, Hannah Maria Denning Duer. The diaries are a collection of 12 slim volumes documenting Mrs. Duer’s life from January 1838 to June 1862. They open with a four-year period when Mrs. Duer, as the wife of […]
Lou Gehrig Day
Major League Baseball (MLB) has declared that, starting this year, June 2 will annually be set aside to pay tribute to the late Lou Gehrig, the legendary New York Yankees first baseman whose career was cut short by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) – the disease forever associated with him. Did you know that before he […]
From Amsterdam Avenue to Broadway
From 1915 to 1922, Columbia football games were played on South Field right on the Morningside campus. A recently re-discovered photograph captures not only the old “stadium” with a game in progress (!), but even neighbors enjoying the game from the rooftops along 114th Street. Before John Jay Hall, Butler Library and Lerner Hall, you […]
Bugs for the Month of May
As billions of Brood X cicadas get ready to emerge from the ground, we look back to the billions of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) that helped a former Columbia faculty member claim the 1933 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. Thomas Hunt Morgan (faculty 1904-1928) and his team of researchers laid the foundations to modern […]