Secret Histories: Wolverine Writers Uncover the Hidden Truths of U-M’s Past

June 13, 2024

A Regent and Governor whose adopted daughter was in reality his wife. A future serial killer sheltered by the faculty. Japanese-Americans recruited from internment camps to clean dormitories. Three talented writers of Michigan history from publications across campus will explain more about these stories and their own unique experiences writing about the University's history: Kim Clarke, director and chief editor of the Michigan Heritage Project; Deborah Holdship, editor of Michigan Today; and Lara Zielin, editor of the Bentley Historical Library’s own Collections magazine.

Making Big History: How U-M Added Billions of Years to Students’ Education

April 25, 2024

In today’s schools, students are frequently taught a variety of specialized subjects with little sense of how they relate to each other or the world around them. The Big History Project seeks to change this by building off students’ natural curiosity about our world and its nature. Over the last fifteen years U-M faculty in the Marsal Family School of Education, with support from Bill Gates, have helped develop Big History into a revolutionary program now taught in over 3,000 American schools and over 40 countries worldwide. Within the Project students travel over 14 billion years from the Big Bang to the rise of agriculture and beyond. Weaving together history, astronomy, biology, chemistry, and many other subjects into a single narrative the Projects has helped elementary and high school students better understand people, civilizations, and how we are connected to everything around us.

Arts & Resistance: “Reimagining Mars: From ‘Canals’ to the Russian Revolution”

October 23, 2023

This talk dives deep into the so-called “canals” of Mars — first described in 1877 by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli — and how they made Mars a central landscape in many works of fiction in the late 19th and early 20th century.