‘Will the girl who took my shirt and left her poetry…’

A classified personal ad from the Michigan Daily.

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.

  1. Black and white image of caucasian man in easy chair on a stage interviewing a person on a giant video monitor. The people are Enoch Brater, University of Michigan professor emeritus, and playwright/alumnus Arthur Miller.

    Swept away by Beckett and dining with Miller

    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.’

  2. Six planes fly over Michigan Stadium, leaving white smoke trails against a bright blue sky. before the first game of the 2024 Michigan Football season. In the foreground, fans waiting to get into the gate take photos with their phones.

    Game changer: Revenue sharing and college sports

    On June 6, Judge Claudia Wilken gave final approval of the House vs. NCAA case, which will drastically change the landscape of college athletics. The settlement results have a significant impact on the financial model at Michigan Athletics, not to mention the way all college athletics are structured.

  3. A black and white graphic of a tick and a mosquito side by side.

    Mosquitos and ticks: 6 tips to swat away two summer spoilers for kids

    While usually just irritating, bites from these two insects may also transmit disease. But choosing the right repellent or protection for children can be confusing for some families, according to the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health. Don’t worry. Hear from a Michigan Medicine pediatrician who simplifies the information and offers parents valuable tips to combat these pesky bloodsuckers.

  4. Illustration by William Iseminger/Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. At its peak, up to 20,000 inhabitants lived, worked, and gathered at Cahokia. Picture an aerial map of a city with buildings, roads, rivers, etc.

    Notes from underground

    Archaeological excavation as a practice is both expensive and destructive, often causing irreparable damage to sites with sacred and historical significance. LSA archaeologist Robin Beck and his colleagues have developed a project using new technologies to conduct the largest geophysical survey of an archaeological site in the Americas — Cahokia Mounds — at a very large scale without the costs and harms of excavation.

  5. Sepia-toned image of young caucasian woman, June Rose Colby in the 1870s, surrounded by a collage of educational items -- books, class photo -- reflecting her time at the University of Michigan.

    June Rose Colby: First female PhD was a ‘perennial educator’

    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.”

  6. A group of people sit in a small stone amphitheatre on a sunny day in the woods at U-M's Nichols Arboretum while an instructor speaks.

    There is joy in the woods

    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 good old summertime

Some call it Bug Camp, this isolated outpost about 20 miles south of Michigan’s Mackinac Bridge. Its actual name is the U-M Biological Station, located on more than 10,000 forested acres along the south shore of Douglas Lake in Cheboygan County. Imagine a summer camp for grownup scientists. As these gorgeous images from Michigan Photography show, the BioStation delivers an extraordinary learning and research experience for U-M faculty and students, scientists, and anyone who loves nature. 

  • Into the woods

    Forests across the United States — and especially forest soils — store massive amounts of carbon, offsetting about 10% of the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions and helping to mitigate climate change. But experts warn the strength of this carbon “sink” is declining and will level off around mid-century. One way to compensate for the declining sink strength of U.S. forests is to add more trees — by actively replanting after disturbances like wildfires or by allowing forests to retake marginal croplands. (Image credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.)

    A bunch of people wearing Michigan-branded t-shirts and other gear go walking in the woods at the U-M BioStation in Pellston, Michigan.

  • Eternal beauty

    The BioStation traces its roots to 1874, when the University decided engineering students needed a place to learn surveying. A temporary camp moved from site to site before settling down in 1908 in Pellston, Michigan. Eventually, doors opened to students of biology and botany. Today, researchers representing institutions from around the world conduct field-based research at UMBS. (Image courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.)

    Sepia toned image of Douglas Lake from the shores of the U-M BioStation.

  • Logging time

    Researchers have been logging and burning small, contiguous plots at the BioStation in a long-running experiment that seeks to approximate, on a tiny scale, the epic lumbering and wildfire disturbances that transformed the forest at the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and throughout the Upper Great Lakes region. The first plot was established in an aspen forest by plant ecologist Frank Gates in 1936.  (Image credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.)

     

    Workers in orange vests and hardhats walk down a path in a barren forest after they cut down a bunch of trees in a logging operation.

  • Lake living

    Early U-M Great Lakes research was mainly concerned with fish and fisheries, but the emphasis began to shift to basic limnology, the scientific study of bodies of freshwater such as lakes, after the 1920s. (Image credit: Austin Thomason, Michigan Photography.)

    Moonlight firepit on the shores of Douglas Lake at the U-M BioStation in Pellston, Michigan.

  • A very, very fine house

    Students from multiple schools and colleges constructed the BioStation’s straw bale building as part of a green building course created by Joe Trumpey, a professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability and the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design. Students have also constructed a straw bale building at the Campus Farm on the grounds of the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor. (Image credit: Austin Thomason, Michigan Photography.)

    Student in green tank top and hard hat applies blobs of mud and straw to a structure in Pellston, Michigan at the U-M BioStation.

  • Burning for you

    Here, researchers execute a controlled burn of wooded land at the BioStation in 2017. The burn plots provide snapshots of different-aged forests and contain a changing mix of plant and tree species. Except for these small plots and a few pockets of old-growth trees, most of the forest at the BioStation dates to 1911, the last time the property was severely burned by post-logging wildfires. (Image credit: Roger Hart, Michigan Photography.)

    Researchers and scientists from the University Michigan stage a controlled burn of three plots of wooded land at the UM Biological Station near Pellston, Michigan. Smoky forest.

  • Walk this way

    In 2016, researchers at the BioStation installed motion-triggered “camera traps” to capture snapshots of the state’s diverse wildlife. They were mainly interested in carnivores, the meat eaters. Can anyone identify this print along the sandy shores of Douglas Lake? (Image credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.)

    Finger points to a mysterious paw print in the sand.

  • Can you hear me now?

    It is commonly assumed that as forest ecosystems age, they accumulate and “sequester” more carbon. A recent study based at the BioStation untangled carbon cycling over two centuries and found a reality more nuanced than that. The research was published in the journal Ecological Applications.  (Image credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.)

    A trio of young scientists in the forest at the U-M BioStation in Northern Michigan.

  • Come inside

    The indoors is as visually stimulating as the outdoors at the U-M BioStation. The largest building at camp is the Alfred H. Stockard Lakeside Laboratory with 24,000 square feet of floor space designed for biological research. (Image credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.)

    The interior of a facility at the U-M BioStation near Pellston, Michigan.

  • If you know, you know

    We’ll let this one speak for itself.

    (Image credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.)

    Two people take a rowboat into a Douglas Lake in Pellston, Michigan, for a moonlight experience.