Program Recordings
September 19, 2017 | Video
Leland Stanford Jr., only son of Governor and railroad tycoon Leland Stanford Sr. and heiress Jane Lathrop Stanford, died suddenly in 1884, just shy of his 16th birthday. It is no secret that the Leland Stanford Junior University and Museum were created in memoriam for Leland Jr., but much less is said about how these institutions, and in particular the museum, emerged. The museum’s early collections reflect Leland Jr.’s curatorial interests, nurtured by his doting parents’ great wealth, class tastes, and social connections. Renowned curators even reckoned Leland Jr.’s early death...
Stanford University’s Central Energy Facility: Celebrating 125 Years of Innovation in Energy Systems
June 15, 2017 | Audio
Presentations by Laura Jones, Joseph Stagner and James L. Sweeney on Stanford’s innovative new Central Energy Facility that transformed the university’s energy supply from a 100% fossil fuel-based system to an electrically...
May 23, 2017 | Video
Stanford’s “Old Chem” opened its doors in 1902 and was home to the Department of Chemistry until 1989. Severe damage in the Loma Prieta earthquake required that “Old Chem” be closed. Surrounded by a tall hurricane fence for almost 30 years, “Old Chem” remained a much-admired historical building. A thorough renovation was finally undertaken and “Old Chem” reopened in 2016 as the Sapp Center for Science Teaching and Learning. With great care, the renovation retained the historic architectural character of this important building.
Remarks | Richard Sapp, Member,...
April 19, 2017 | Video
In this talk, Paul Wesling brings us back to early Stanford engineers, campus faculty kids around 1915, local Hams (amateur radio operators) trying to break RCA's tube patents, the sinking of the Titanic, angel investments, Fred Terman and Stanford University, local invention of high-power tubes (gammatron, klystron), WWII and radar, new approaches to running companies, and the San Francisco Bay Area...
March 15, 2017 | Video
- Computers in Love: Date Matching at Stanford, Sandstone & Tile, Vol. 26, No. 2-3. 2002.
The seeds of Stanford’s currently most popular undergraduate major, computer science, grew from the university’s administrative needs, and those of science and engineering research. Provost Fred Terman’s prescient vision of an emerging discipline—the science and engineering of computation—led to the 1957 hiring of George Forsythe to fill a Math Department...
February 7, 2017 | Audio
It all happened with the speed of a start-up. Right after being hired as Stanford University's founding president in March 1891, David Starr Jordan recruited energetic faculty like math professor Joseph Swain, who in turn quickly brought promising students to the still unfinished campus. Swain was impressed by a 17 year old orphan from Oregon, Herbert Hoover, who showed great talent on the math entrance exam. ...
January 18, 2017 | Video
Ray Purpur, who joined Stanford University in 1994, take us back to the early days when Stanford's athletics program began. Unlike many colleges and universities, Stanford was coeducational from the start and its athletics program featured both men’s and women’s sports. Ray Purpur shows us what it all looked like 125 years ago.
November 9, 2016 | Audio
With the re-opening of Roble Gym in the fall of 2016, the Department of Theater & Performance Studies reflects on the rich history of theater, dance, and performance at Stanford. In a conversation with TAPS Chair Branislav Jakovljevic, Professor Janice Ross and Professor Emeritus Bill Eddelman trace the evolution of the performing arts in the heart of Silicon Valley.
October 6, 2016 | Audio
Leland and Jane Stanford founded their university amidst the kinetic tumult of Gilded Age America. It was a time of swashbuckling capitalist ambition, let-‘er-rip financial finagling, and epic corruption. It was also a time of accelerating...
May 17, 2016 | Video
Through reminiscences of her many years working with Stanford’s leaders in the arts, Mona Duggan takes us back to the time when the Department of Art and Stanford Museum were joined, and will touch on the milestones that have set the stage for the current renaissance of the arts on campus. Alexander Nemerov speaks about the present and future state of the Department of Art and Art History in its new home, the McMurtry Building.
March 2, 2016 | Video
The United States had been at war for over a year in the spring of 1943 when Edith Dowley left her teaching post at the laboratory school of University of Michigan to head to Portland, Oregon. There, industrialist Henry Kaiser, the father of modern shipbuilding, had created two state-of-the-art Children's Centers to care for the offspring of the four thousand women workers responsible for producing the "bridge of ships" that carried troops, food, fuel, ammunition, and medicine to the fighting fronts. By the end of the war in June 1945, the Kaiser Children's Centers had cared for 3,811...
February 18, 2016 | Audio
2015 marked the 150th anniversary of the introduction of large numbers of Chinese workers on the construction of the first transcontinental railway across North America. May 10, 2019 will be the 150th anniversary of Leland Stanford’s driving...
