‘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. An archaeological mystery in a half-ton lead coffin

    In the ruins of a city that was once Rome’s neighbor, archaeologists last summer found a 1,000-pound lead coffin. Who or what is inside is still a mystery, said U-M’s Nicola Terrenato, who leads the largest American dig in Italy in the past 50 years. “We’re very excited about this find. Romans as a rule were not buried in coffins to begin with and when they did use coffins, they were mostly wooden. There are only a handful of other examples from Italy of lead coffins from this age.”

  2. Artist of the Chill and Canyon

    Lawrence Kasdan, director of ‘The Big Chill,’ ‘Grand Canyon’ and other classics, recalls his U-M days.

  3. © The Ann Arbor News.

    The flap over ‘Flaming Creatures’

    The 1967 on-campus screening of the experimental film epitomized the era: controversy over content that was either “art” or “filth,” battles over academic freedom and angry protests by students.

  4. Michigan is Movie Land

    The tax incentives that have made Michigan a movie-making hotbed are also transforming U-M. Film crews are shooting on campus, bolstering the local economy and giving U-M students a reason — and an opportunity — to remain, work and learn in Michigan.

  5. Hand – carved history

    For generations of Michigan alumni, senior canes unlocked the vaults of memory.

  6. Michigan will finally snap decade-long streak of job losses

    After enduring one of its worst years ever in 2009, Michigan’s economy will flounder this year before showing some improvement in 2011, say University of Michigan economists

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.