#harvardgazette

[harvardfineartslib]

Black History Month is a time to celebrate the contributions of Black people in the nation’s history. The founder of Black History Month was Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950), known as the father of Black history and the second Black person to receive Ph.D. from Harvard University. While growing up on his family’s farm in Virginia, Woodson’s enslaved uncles taught him in a one-room schoolhouse. Before high school, he worked in coal mines alongside formerly enslaved men and Civil War veterans who were illiterate. Woodson came to understand the importance of education and the knowledge gained from Black people’s lived experiences, which should be both preserved and celebrated.

As a scholar and educator, Woodson wrote many influential books including “The Mis-Education of the Negro” published in 1933 and “African Heroes and Heroines” published in 1944. His critique of the American school system for the various forms of violence inflicted upon Black people and inequality to access is still very relevant. He also wrote on the rich history of Africa and African American life to educate teachers and the public about the myriad contributions of Black people.

Before Woodson created Negro History Week in 1926, many Black teachers were already celebrating the birthdays of various figures such as Frederick Douglass, who was born in February. Woodson offered an institutional structure with materials that could be disseminated across Black schools. The week was eventually expanded to a month-long celebration starting in 1976.

You can read more about Carter G. Woodson in the Harvard Gazette, in a recent interview with Jarvis Givens, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

The image is the cover of “African Heroes and Heroines”, a part of FAL’s Digital Images and Slides Collection (DISC), a collection of images digitized from secondary sources for use in teaching and learning. FAL does not own the original artworks represented in this collection, but you can find more information at HOLLIS Images.

Cover for Carter Woodson's African Heroes and Heroines Author / Creator Jones, Lois Mailou, American and African American artist, 1905-1998 [artist] Production: Washington D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1939 Woodson, Carter Godwin, American historian, 1875-1950 Repository: Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Atlanta, Fulton, Georgia, United States HOLLIS number: 8001690410

[transsolar]

Sustainability Certifications for Harvard Science and Engineering Complex          

Transsolar is proud to announce that the Harvard Science and Engineering Complex has achieved both LEED Platinum certification and Living Building Challenge Petal certification in healthier Materials, Beauty, and Equity.  This is an unprecedented achievement for Harvard and thus makes it the largest building, and the first building with wet labs, in the world to achieve Living Building Challenge certification. Transsolar led development of the integrated climate and energy concept with special emphasis on three separate façade concepts, natural ventilation, and laboratory ventilation.

We’re proud of this achievement and appreciative of our collaborative work with Behnisch Architekten.

Read more in The Harvard Gazette>

Photo: With courtesy of Behnisch Architekten

[harvardfineartslib]

“… if you really want to make a librarian mad, burn down a library.”

András Riedlmayer, Bibliographer in Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard’s Fine Arts Library, made this comment when asked why he undertook his project to collect, preserve and publicize evidence of the destruction of cultural heritage in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The story about his work in the Balkans is profiled in the Harvard Gazette.

Riedlmayer testified at the UN war crimes tribunal (ICTY) in The Hague in the trials of 14 Serbian and Bosnian Serb officials, as an expert on cultural destruction in the Balkans. Among the defendants was former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević, accused of war crimes and genocide in Kosovo and Bosnia. Although Milošević died of a heart attack before the ICTY could deliver a verdict in his case, 11 of the others were convicted and sent to prison.

Read more about his ongoing efforts to preserve documentation on the cultural heritage of the Balkans and its fate in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, in the Harvard Gazette.

Image 1: Carralevë, Kosovo. Inside the burned-out village mosque, October 1999: Torn and desecrated pages from Qur'ans & religious books, in the aftermath of the Kosovo war. (Photo courtesy of András Riedlmayer). 

Image 2: Carralevë, Kosovo. Agim Orllatë, a Kosovar Albanian university student who worked with Riedlmayer as an interpreter, looks at torn religious texts inside the village mosque, torched by Serbian soldiers in 1999. (Photo courtesy of András Riedlmayer) 

Image 3: Remains of a Qur’an, its pages ripped from its binding and partially burned, among the items collected by Riedlmayer in Oct. 1999 from the village mosque in Carralevë, Kosovo. (Photo: Naoe Suzuki) 

Image 4: Riedlmayer selecting damaged book pages to be sent for an exhibition on cultural heritage and war, held at the Imperial War Museum in London in 2019. (Photo: Naoe Suzuki) 

Image 5: A selection of the damaged pages of books & manuscripts collected by Riedlmayer in Oct. 1999 from the village mosque in Carralevë, Kosovo. (Photo: Naoe Suzuki) 

Image 6: A partially burned monthly church bulletin from a Serbian Orthodox monastery chapel at Buzovik, Kosovo, targeted in a revenge attack by Kosovo Albanians after the end of the war. One of the items collected by Riedlmayer during his fieldwork in Kosovo in Oct. 1999. (Photo: Naoe Suzuki)

Image 7: One of the damaged and desecrated books & manuscripts collected by Riedlmayer in Oct. 1999 from the village mosque in Carralevë, Kosovo. (Photo: Naoe Suzuki)

[mrglitterati]

Could a new test identify immunity?

Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch outlined several scenarios — most of them bad — for getting America back to work.

[transsolar]

Die Nachhaltigkeit des Harvard Science and Engineering Complex ist nun zertifiziert                                        

Wir von Transsolar freuen uns, dass dies nun offiziell ist: Der Harvard Science and Engineering Complex hat sowohl die LEED Platin-Zertifizierung, als auch die Living Building Challenge Petal-Zertifizierung in den Bereichen gesündere Materialien, Schönheit und Gerechtigkeit erhalten. Diese Auszeichnungen erzielt Harvard erstmalig und obendrein ist der Komplex der größte auf der Welt mit Nasslaboratorien, der die Living Building Challenge-Zertifizierung erhält. Transsolar war federführend bei der Entwicklung des integrierten Klima- und Energiekonzepts mit besonderem Augenmerk auf drei separate Fassadenkonzepte, natürliche Belüftung und Laborbelüftung.

Ein Projekt, das uns stolz macht und dankbar für die Zusammenarbeit mit Behnisch Architekten.

Mehr dazu auf Englisch The Harvard Gazette>

Foto: Mit freundlicher Genehmigung von Behnisch Architekten

[1229journal]

It’s a seminal passage in literature, so famous in fact, that it has its own name: the Proustian moment — a sensory experience that triggers a rush of memories often long past, or even seemingly forgotten. For French author Marcel Proust, who penned the legendary lines in his 1913 novel, “À la recherche du temps perdu,” it was the soupçon of cake in tea that sent his mind reeling. But according to a biologist and an olfactory branding specialist Wednesday, it was the nose that was really at work. - @harvardmuseum . . . #harvardgazette #marcelproust #memory #visceral #harvardmuseumofnaturalhistory https://www.instagram.com/p/B9VELxtgM4n/?igshid=1qxkp8lda1yuh

[harvardfineartslib]

Our campus is getting ready for tomorrow’s Commencement.

Massachusetts Hall, the oldest surviving Harvard building, has been here for almost 300 years, witnessing the changes and history on the campus and surrounding communities. The building has been a dormitory, an army barracks, a lecture hall, an observatory, administrative offices.

Built in 1720, the building served the Continental Army during the Revolution in 1775‒76 and even survived a devastating fire in 1924.

You can read about the history of Massachusetts Hall, and see the changes the building witnessed in the slide presentation in Harvard Gazette’s article.

Tomorrow, along with other old buildings on campus, Massachusetts Hall will once again witness one of the greatest moments in many people’s lives, and see many proud faces of our graduates’ families and friends.

Massachusetts Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Author / Creator : Ware and Van Brunt [architect] Creation Date: 1718-1720 General: altered 1812 by L. Baldwin; altered 1870 by Ware and Van Brunt. Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Image Title : exterior, 1875 

Harvard Fine Arts Library Special Collections

[naheemc]

GAZETTE: How do you believe Islam is perceived in popular society? ASANI: We are witnessing an ideological competition, battle between different interpretations of the faith, and these profoundly impact popular perceptions of the faith. His Highness the Aga Khan espouses a cosmopolitan vision of Islam which embraces religious, ethnic, and cultural diversities. Other interpretations of Islam are ahistorical and acultural in their approach, often defining it through negative terms, by which I mean they define what is Islamic in purely ideological terms, by what they think it is not, that is, against a perceived theological and cultural “other.” Several such groups are opposed to the cultural arts and music. They go around destroying our shared human cultural heritage. They have their reasons for doing so, grounded in their context, but their highly ideological and polarizing vision of Islam contrasts starkly with the Aga Khan’s — especially his promotion of the arts through various initiatives such as the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, jointly administered by Harvard and MIT, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which is engaged in restoring historic monuments in several cities in Africa and Asia, and the Aga Khan Music Initiative.

Battling religious illiteracy | Harvard Gazette