My name is Taharat Sheikh and I am one of four incredibly fortunate freshmen chosen to be a Special Collections Freshman Fellow. I plan to pursue a double major in Neuroscience and the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology though I am, by all accounts, a lover of the humanities at heart. It is precisely […]
It has truly been a pleasure to be a Freshman Fellow this year. In the second half of my research, through translations and close-readings, I delved deeper into the correspondence between Jose Robles’ family, trapped in war-torn Spain, and his friends in the U.S. Even now, as I recollect my memories of sitting in the Special Collections Reading Room, and […]
In 1961, following several years of planning, the Trustees approved the construction of a new library facility at Homewood, and settled on the open end of the Keyser Quadrangle, facing Gilman Hall, as the ideal location. Architects Wrenn, Lewis, and Jencks proposed building the library primarily underground. Were such a structure to be built above […]
A group of private citizens, headed by William Wyman and William Keyser, donated land that became the Homewood Campus in 1902, and the library moved into new quarters upon the completion of Gilman Hall in 1916. The library occupied the inner portion of a hollow square on three levels, placing faculty and graduate student offices […]
Each year Hopkins welcomes new students and faculty who may not know the history behind one of the academic world’s most renowned libraries. So, sit back as we tell the story of the Hopkins library, from the very beginning. This history will be divided into three monthly segments. This first segment covers the years 1876 […]
Because I believe the issue of student apathy has been part of our history since the university’s founding, I didn’t think my final project would be complete without discussing the full evolution of student housing and its interaction with student life in general. For the project, I divided the school’s history into distinct time periods […]
After beginning my freshman fellowship experience last semester, I found myself with a solid foundation of knowledge regarding student housing. The information I had found during the first half of my project seemed to span a variety of time periods, and a wide number of topics, leaving me with even more questions about where my […]
Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, Johns Hopkins’ first professor of Greek, was born in 1831 in Charleston, South Carolina, and was orphaned at a young age. Gildersleeve proved to be a precocious child who displayed a hunger for classical learning. His determination took him first to the College of Charleston, then to Jefferson College in Pennsylvania and […]
For the past 5 months, I’ve been discovering what it means to be a student here at Hopkins. From the importance of academics and the shared sense of competition, to locating the steam tunnel entrances and avoiding the lines at the FFC, freshmen like me are just beginning to get the hang of being a […]
The Johns Hopkins University conferred its first degrees in 1878, two years after our founding (four PhDs). The first undergraduate degrees were conferred in 1879 (three BAs). However, until 1884, there were no Commencement exercises, and it was not until 1886 that diplomas were awarded to graduates. According to John C. French, in A History of the […]