Monthly Archives: April 2011

Year 114 – 1974: Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers edited by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong

Published: Washington, D.C., 1974 In 1973, there was no such thing as “Asian American literature.” It was not a category discussed by scholars, much less a genre known by writers, booksellers, and the reading public. Then came Aiiieeeee!, published by the Howard University Press in 1974. The title, a reappropriation of the stereotypical scream of “the yellow man” depicted in popular “white American culture,” was meant to represent the cry of “Asian America, so long ignored and forcibly excluded from participation in American culture.” The editors were four young writers and intellectuals who decided to reclaim the work of fellow […]

Year 113 – 1973: Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective

Published: New York, 1973 At first glance, someone might wonder why the MIT Libraries haven’t withdrawn this ancient-looking volume. The paper it was printed on is cheap, and turning brown and brittle. The photos and drawings are black and white; most were provided by members of the Boston Women’s Health Collective and their friends. The book has that homemade “Sixties and Seventies look.” The front cover of this first edition bears a large black and white photograph of three women holding a handwritten sign that says, “Women Unite.” They’re not alone but are part of a demonstration in the early […]

Year 112 – 1972: Papers on the War by Daniel Ellsberg

Published: New York, 1972 Daniel Ellsberg began working for the RAND Corporation as a decisionmaking/policy consultant in 1959. In the mid-1960s he moved to the U.S. Defense Department and the Department of State, and spent two years in Vietnam observing the war. In 1967 he returned to RAND and began working on a study, sponsored by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, on the escalation of the war and U.S. decisionmaking in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968. The report, later to be known as the “Pentagon Papers,” revealed that Congress and the American public had been misinformed repeatedly about the actual […]

Year 111 – 1971: The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven by Charles Rosen

Published: New York, 1971 Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style won the 1972 National Book Award in Arts and Letters. It has since become a standard text – perhaps the definitive text – on the three great masters of the classical style, as well as on the style itself. Rosen is remarkable both for his erudition and for the clarity and elegance of his writing. But he didn’t begin his career authoring book-length works. For Rosen isn’t just an important scholar. He’s also a celebrated pianist – he completed his studies at Juilliard at the age of eleven. He earned his […]

Year 110 – 1970: MIghTy Dead by The Grateful Dead

Live performance recorded: Cambridge, Mass., May 6, 1970 On the morning of May 4, 1970, four unarmed students were shot dead during student protests at Kent State University. That afternoon, over 1500 members of the MIT community, including over 200 faculty, flooded into the Kresge Auditorium and voted overwhelmingly to strike “in solidarity with the national university strike,” according to the May 5 edition of The Tech. The meeting’s consensus “emphasized the desirability of a broadly-based action including all faculty and administrators willing to work against the Vietnam War.” Classes were suspended, faculty was urged to be flexible about delayed […]

Year 109 – 1969: Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto by Vine Deloria, Jr.

Published: New York, 1969 Before the American Indian Movement temporarily seized the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972, and before its occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, Vine Deloria cast the Native American struggle into the public consciousness with what remains one of the most esteemed nonfiction books in the American Indian corpus. Deftly blending humor, social critique, and call for reform, Deloria challenges Native American stereotypes as well as agencies’ attempts to “help” the natives. What’s more, he’s not afraid to call authorities out on their own hypocrisies. “Some years back,” Deloria writes, Richard Nixon warned the American people […]

Year 108 – 1968: Canticle of Freedom by Aaron Copland

Published: New York, 1968 (original version premiered: Cambridge, Mass., 1955) “Freedom is a noble thing!” That is the first line intoned by the chorus in the finale of Aaron Copland’s Canticle of Freedom, a piece commissioned by MIT for the 1955 dedication of Kresge Auditorium and the MIT Chapel. Famed modernist architect Eero Saarinen designed both the domed, 1200-seat auditorium and the cylindrical, windowless chapel that sits near it within a concrete moat. On May 8, 1955, James R. Killian Jr., president of the Institute, accepted the buildings. During the festivities, Copland’s Canticle was conducted by Klaus Liepmann, the founder […]

Year 107 – 1967: Economics: An Introductory Analysis by Paul A. Samuelson

Published: New York, 1967 Paul Samuelson’s Economics is the very definition of the “standard text in its field”: according to the New York Times, it was the nation’s best-selling textbook for 30 years. Originally published in 1948, it’s still selling briskly more than 60 years later. Generations of budding economists and countless other college graduates have learned the basics of supply and demand, interest and capital, market structure, and just about everything else concerning economics, from Samuelson. It’s been said that he “created” modern economics; that his biggest contribution to the field was, in essence, changing the very way in […]

Year 106 – 1966: The Polite Americans: A Wide-Angle View of our More or Less Good Manners over 300 Years by Gerald Carson

Published: New York, 1966 Today, if you please, we’d like to survey American manners. Gerald Carson’s The Polite Americans starts out in the rigid confines of Colonial Massachusetts, where propriety dictated that the populace was allowed to wear “Gold or Silver lace, or Buttons, or Points at [their] knees” only if they possessed “a capital of over £200.” A later chapter is devoted entirely to dueling, in which opponents may assault one another with deadly weapons, but must do so with the utmost politeness. Carson describes the sort of challenge to one’s honor that might necessitate a duel. One example […]

Year 105 – 1965: Boston Inner Belt Expressway, I-695 in Boston Brookline & Cambridge: Basic Design Report

Published: St. Louis and Boston, 1965 By the time this report was prepared for the Massachusetts Department of Public Works in 1965, the idea of building an expressway from Roxbury to Somerville had been around for more than a decade and a half. The initial plan for I-695 was proposed in 1948. The route would have begun in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, cut through Brookline, bisected Cambridge right in MIT’s backyard, and reconnected with I-93 in Somerville. Needless to say, this 7.3-mile loop would have effected a drastic change on the urban landscape. As crews began clearing the right-of-way in the […]