Ritual warfare between freshman and sophomore men had erupted every autumn at Michigan since at least the Civil War. But Black Friday 1908 turned especially nasty. The administration declared the annual rush ‘an abomination, a disgrace to an American university.’

With a B.A. in English composition from U-M, Eugene Mandeberg went into combat as a Navy fighter pilot in the last weeks of World War II. When the atomic bombs fell on Japan, he had reason to think his war was over. It wasn’t.

James Craig Watson, second director of U-M’s Detroit Observatory, was a gifted young astronomer when astronomy itself was young. Considered by Henry Simmons Frieze to be one of the ‘most brilliant man we have ever raised up here,’ Watson also was a first-class faker.

In the early 1900s, restless European shoemaker Tom ‘Doc’ Lovell had creative aspirations beyond his humble ‘hospital for sick shoes’ on Huron Street. The frustrated entertainer would find his stage on the streets of Ann Arbor where he built a loyal fanbase drawn to his homespun wisdom, poetry, and music.

In 1965, Edward H. White II, a 1959 graduate in aeronautical engineering and the pilot of NASA’s Gemini IV, became the first American to walk in space. White was traveling with one other astronaut, James A. McDivitt, a fellow Wolverine from the Class of 1959. They had attached American flags to their space suits, kicking off a longstanding tradition of astronauts donning the Stars and Stripes.

When Edward Mears discovered a photo, dated 1933, of his grandmother and her friends at U-M’s Alpha Lambda Chinese fraternity, his imagination lit up. One of his grandmother’s friends, an Asian man, had inscribed the photo ‘To Veronica, with love, Ben.’ The inscription inspired a deep dive at the Bentley and took the Michigan Law grad across continents. The story is still unfolding.

Before social media, before dating apps, there were personal ads, a department of newspapers’ classified advertising sections that spiced up the paper’s lifeless gray columns. A dive into The Michigan Daily’s digital archive reveals an especially creative era on campus when Michigan students used the Daily’s back pages to express their emotions and connect.

Before 1886, U-M had never granted a doctoral degree to a female student. But the University had never admitted a female student like June Rose Colby before. “From the time it opened to women when I was 14 and knew I was to go to Michigan, it gave a settled purpose and wider outlook,” this passionate lifelong educator would write. “The work in the University was sound, hard, enlightening, creating or feeding a never-ceasing hunger for things of the mind.”

In 1967, a collective panic was rising over illicit drug use in American society. Just then, John C. Pollard, a scientist in the Medical School’s Mental Health Research Institute, made headlines for his research into the widespread use and abuse of consciousness-altering substances among young people.