When U-M regents broke ground on North Campus in 1952, they were responding to more than a postwar growth spurt in admissions. They were signaling the University’s full embrace of research applied to the demands of an urban, industrial society.

Michigan’s William Clements Library — one of the world’s leading archives of U.S. history and Americana — holds a small but fascinating cache of papers of the singer and actor Bing Crosby, including several items linked to the holiday movie classic, ‘White Christmas.’

In 1945, Sarah Elizabeth Ray was denied passage on a ferry on the Detroit River because she was Black. She fought the injustice, became a civil rights activist, and her case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, her legacy is being preserved in a collection coming to the Bentley Historical Library.

In the 1910s, anarchist, writer, and provocateur Emma Goldman, described by J. Edgar Hoover as ‘the most dangerous woman in America,’ paid regular visits to Ann Arbor. She described one rowdy U-M crowd as ‘pampered parasites, not one of them with enough backbone to fight a flea.’

Horace and Jennie Prettyman’s sprawling manse on North University was Ann Arbor’s best-known boarding house, serving more than a million meals to students from 1875 to 1914 — including Fielding Yost’s varsity football players, who ate there nightly.

The first Japanese American workers arrived on the U-M campus in 1943. When they were willing to wash dishes and stock shelves, the University opened its doors. When they applied as students, the doors closed.

She fled the tenements of Brooklyn in the 1920s to follow her boyfriend to the U-M Law School. She got married, struggled to blend in with the coeds, and sought refuge in the library when things went awry. Then, Betty Smith, the future author of ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ met playwright and professor Kenneth Thorpe Rowe. His mentorship set her on a path that produced the bestselling novel of 1944.

As a Michigan Daily reporter/editor who helped unseat Regent Eugene Power in 1966, Roger Rapoport, BA ’68, was persona non grata among the U-M administration till he graduated. How surprising then that in June 1967 he celebrated the modern-day “multiversity” in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly.

This nondescript patch of land in the heart of Ann Arbor has been home base for varsity athletes, amateur players, marching musicians, and many others during the last seven decades. In August, the field will move to make space for a $500-million complex of student residence halls.