For 50 years, Enoch Brater shared his passion for literature and the theatre with thousands of like-minded students at U-M. The University’s Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor Emeritus of Dramatic Literature retired in spring 2025. As a renowned expert on Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller, he viewed plays as ‘literature meant to be performed.’

Students recently transformed U-M’s Nichols Arboretum into an art exhibit, reminding visitors that “the earth is a living thing.” People were guided not by maps or botanical information, but by poetry—a different kind of navigation system. One message on a wooden placard instructed visitors to “Walk/through the garden’s dormant splendor./Say only, thank you.”

The U-M Symphony Band toured the state in May, offering free clinics to high school students and performing in 11 communities from Belleville to Interlochen. Some 1,500 student musicians received guidance by U-M band students and faculty in interactive, side-by-side tutorials.

The ‘shot heard ’round the world’ can be traced to one manuscript containing the orders for the Concord Expedition on April 18, 1775. The quill-to-paper draft orders, penned by British Army officer Thomas Gage, sparked the Battle at Lexington and Concord the following day. U-M’s Clements Library holds the document.

The Robert M. Vogel Collection of Historic Images of Engineering & Industry includes nearly 23,000 photographs of civil engineering, industrial processes, and mechanization of the 19th century, as well as over 1,200 prints, books, ephemera and realia.

In February, U-M’s Kari Landry and Andrew Koeppe won the Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition for ‘Strands,” a piece they’d recorded with their reed quintet Akropolis. Some 16 years before they stood on stage with a statuette at LA’s Peacock Theater, the five members of Akropolis were undergrads majoring in music at U-M.

The U-M Library recently opened access to a digitized archive of some 1,300 fan letters sent in response to the 1938 broadcast of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds.” These letters dispel the myth — long perpetuated by the media — that Welles’ broadcast incited panic and hysteria.

Many histories have been written about the Cherokee nation. But “Cherokee History and the Spirit Family” by environmental lawyer James Barnes, J.D. ’70, delivers the nation’s history by way of his own expansive family network. ‘It’s personal in that sense,’ he says. And it’s powerful.

The award-winning RC graduate and Ann Arbor native followed one Washington, D.C., family for 20 years, producing a rare document of enduring love, hope, and resilience amid gun violence and economic hardship.