By Ellen Gilbert

Images courtesy of the Department of African American Studies, Princeton University

“It’s about concentric circles radiating out,” Glaude says of the Center for African American Studies logo that will continue to be used to symbolize the new department. “It’s the opposite of being a ghettoized silo.”

The newly created Department of African American Studies at Princeton University must surely be one of the most compelling examples of the expression, “to cast a wide net.”

Formerly called the Center for African American Studies, the department asks its undergraduate majors to “think carefully about the complex interplay between political, economic, and cultural forces shaping the historic achievements and struggles of African-descended people in the United States and their relationship to others around the world.”

“Princeton’s outstanding faculty members in African American studies address cultural, social and political issues of urgent importance to our students, our nation and the world,” Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber observed when the Center’s new departmental status was announced last May. “By approving the establishment of a new Department of African American Studies, the trustees and the faculty of the University have provided Princeton’s students with new opportunities for learning, and they have deepened our commitment to support scholarship of the highest quality in this vibrant field.” more

By Linda Arntzenius

He was America’s most eligible bachelor. She was an ambassador’s daughter born to privilege. Tall, slim and boyishly handsome, he swept her off her feet and into the clouds. Literally. Before long they were flying together, exploring together. They were golden and the tabloids couldn’t get enough of them. But when tragedy struck and the paparazzi became an intrusive burden on their personal lives, they fled to Europe in search of peace. It was bad timing to say the least. Europe in the 1930s was readying for war. Almost inevitably, the expert aviator was drawn into a mire from which he would never fully emerge.

Anne Morrow met Charles Lindbergh just seven months after the young aviator had landed at Le Bourget airfield near Paris at the end of his astonishing 1927 non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic. He was the most famous person on the planet, the first modern superstar, an overnight celebrity welcomed into the most exalted of circles. She was a top Smith College student visiting her parents in Mexico, where her father, Dwight Whitney Morrow, a former partner at J.P. Morgan & Co., was U.S. Ambassador. Lindbergh was on a goodwill tour. more

By Donald Gilpin 

“His life story is something out of a fairy tale, a Greek myth or a Shakespeare play,” said biographer Sylvia Nasar, at last Saturday’s celebration of the life and work of John F. Nash, Jr. at Princeton University.

Hundreds of admirers of Professor Nash and his wife Alicia, who died in a car crash on May 23 on the New Jersey Turnpike on their return home from Norway where he had received the coveted Abel Prize, gathered for a day of lectures, culminating in an early evening Service of Remembrance in the University Chapel. 

In addition to Ms. Nasar, whose 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Mr. Nash, A Beautiful Mind, became the basis for the 2001 Oscar-winning movie with the same title, the day’s speakers included a distinguished array of mathematics and economics professors. The Remembrance Service mixed personal recollections of the Nashes with observations on Mr. Nash’s remarkable career. more