One of the best resources for information about the history of this university lies in the yellowing pages of the Tamarack. Through the words of the students then, it’s easy for readers to put themselves into that year and that space, and feel the slow pace of that time. The academic atmosphere of those hallowed university halls comes into sharper focus as visitors to the Tamarack archive linger with each issue....
Wikipedia tells the history of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in dry, textbook form. Through accounts reported at the time, we learn that on Good Friday (April 14) 1865, John Wilkes Booth, put a bullet into the head of Abraham Lincoln, while the president watched a play at Ford’s Theater. The assassin then made his dramatic escape, and died at the hands of Union soldiers while hiding at a farm in Virginia. We know the story. This, along with other major historical events, is part of our education. We’ve been eased into it since childhood through basic information, animated depictions, and colorful sketches. And while Wikipedia gives us a few more details than we may have had previously, all of it seems distant and impersonal. We place ourselves as viewers of paintings and drawings of this terrible scene a few feet from the president’s back as the pistol at the end of John Wilks Booth’s arm discharges....
There are two great aerial photos of the campus in the beginning pages of the 1965 Tower Yearbook. All the changes that have taken place on campus and the surrounding neighborhood since this time are easy to see from this vantage point....
Long before the world became a blurry line of activity speeding towards the future, Detroit College was a seemingly gentle place filled with the hum of academic learning in the classical sense. Students, dressed in business attire, dutifully sat in stark classrooms memorizing dates and names and theories at wooden desks lined up properly in front of filled blackboards and pacing professors. After class, the halls were likely filled with chuckles and guffaws at jokes that have become tired and boring in the century since. It’s easy to imagine these students walking to their classroom buildings through the bustling streets of the economic boom of downtown Detroit in the late 1800s. They were the future of Detroit, rowdy and driven, and it was these students who would pen the prose and poetry that would be bound and published in the Tamarack, a student publication that appeared between 1890 and 1923....
Did you know that there are currently 112 digitized course catalogs (bulletins) (both undergraduate and graduate) from the University of Detroit, Mercy College, and the University of Detroit Mercy available in our digital archives? These range from 1928 through 2005, and represent offerings from every college, including the Law School and the Dental School. We even have the very first course catalog published for the 1889 to 1890 term. And this archive is growing! Each month, more catalogs are being published to offer visitors a wealth of history in digital format....
Among the items in the Black Abolitionists digital archive are hand-written speeches. The words of the speaker always offer insight into a perspective of history that is only left to use through text records. Yet when you add the actual handwriting, it seems to offer a connection to the writer herself in a more personal way. This speech by Mary Ann Shadd Cary is a great example....
One of the best topics for conversation when nothing else is on table for discussion is the weather. Weather discussion offers you an endless supply of metaphor, an easy connection between strangers (who doesn’t enjoy talking about the weather?), and a huge area for opinion of one sort or another. It also offers a great way to ease into heavier subjects, such as poverty and the misery of the poor....
There are only three small entries in the Black Abolitionist Archive associated with Christmas, so I chose this one. While this holiday was important to an enslaved people learning about the celebration of this Christmas story from the periphery of the Christian families who enslaved them, the way they celebrated this holiday was different. The celebration of any special occasion then was on Church, prayer, thankfulness, and finding joy where they could....
In 1940, the Sisters of Mercy established a presence in Detroit at Southfield and West Outer Drive. About a year later, Mercy College of Detroit began offering classes on this spot that would leave an indelible mark in this city’s history. Over the years until its consolidation with the University of Detroit in 1990, Mercy College expanded from offering nursing and teaching classes to women into a comprehensive coeducational liberal arts college....
It seems an unlikely pairing, but one theory in the history of slavery assures us that Harriet Beecher Stowe was influenced to write her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin after reading the autobiography of Josiah Henson, former slave and Black Abolitionist. Stowe’s character of Uncle Tom even looks a bit like the photograph of Henson available on various web sites devoted to African American history. And according to one site, Henson’s supporters even encouraged this connection after the book’s popularity to...
