Word: morisons
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Today, some 25,000 will pack Harvard's hallowed Yard to march, to gawk, or to enter the "company of educated men and women." The ritual has long since hardened into a sturdy tradition. As Samuel Eliot Morison writes in his history of Harvard, Thomas Aquinas migh recognize today a lineal descent from the Commencement ceremonies he often attended in the 12th century--even then, they were marked by caps and gowns, Latin orations and general confusion...
...festive spirit of Commencement has a longstanding heritage. Morison describes the development of Commencement from "a purely literary occasion" to a "sort of puritan midsummer's holiday." In 1681, when President Oakes perished shortly before Commencement, the authorities seeking a sober ceremony felt compelled to restrict students to a provision of one gallon of wine per man. Despite that one prohibitive graduation, the tradition of imbibement was propagated, climaxing in the "Plum cake scandal" of 1693, when kill-joy President Mather outlawed the tainted pastries, deeming the custom "dishonourable to the Colledge." Needless to say, in spite of various fines...
...those days the city of Cambridge was small. "American frontier history can be told largely in terms of cattle," Samuel Eliot Morison writes in Three Centuries of Harvard. "The present Cambridge Common is merely the apex of a great triangle of cow pasture extended to the borders of the township." Nearly 350 years later, Cambridge is big and crowded--102,000 people packed into six square miles, the third highest population density in America...
...Morison says Harvard's Overseers chose Cambridge as the home for their school in large part because of the "winning way" of the community's leader, Thomas Shepard. But six present-day civic leaders, including Cambridge Mayor Thomas W. Danehy sent a letter to the Board of Overseers this winter asking it to take some action to remedy about "the consistent poor judgment and insensitivity" of Harvard officials in their dealings with the city...
...build an atomic bomb includes a conversation on pioneer nuclear physics that is a masterpiece of layman's clarity. The Navy's little-remembered but terrible defeat at the Battle of Tassafaronga is described more vividly by Wouk than by the late naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison...