The family that had a hand in everything from the U.S. Senate to the Central City Opera to the Denver Broncos also had a lasting impact on DU.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Winter Carnival, a favorite Pioneers tradition. The first Winter Carnival was held the weekend of Jan. 13, 1961, and was sponsored by the Pioneer Ski Club. Although that weekend included a Friday the 13th, the date was selected because it coincided with NCAA […]

For years the University of Denver identified Grace Mabel Andrews as its first African-American graduate. But as is often the case, history may need a little re-writing. Last May, Adjunct Professor Valeria Wenderoth arrived at DU to teach musicology classes for a Lamont School of Music faculty member who had […]

As we celebrate President’s Day on Feb. 21, it is important to remember that without President Abe Lincoln there would be no University of Denver. Although he never set foot in Colorado, Lincoln did set in motion events that led up to the founding of the University. He was a […]

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Winter Carnival, a favorite Pioneers tradition. The first Winter Carnival was held the weekend of Jan. 13, 1961, and was sponsored by the Pioneer Ski Club. Although that weekend included a Friday the 13th, the date was selected because it coincided with NCAA […]

You might not want Phil Goodstein (MA history ’75) to learn too much about your life. He just may find all the skeletons. Goodstein uncovered plenty of bones in his latest book, The Ghosts of University Park, Platt Park and Beyond (New Social Publications, 2010), in which he examines historic […]

The DU Bookstore sells a shirt that says, “University of Denver Football — Undefeated Since 1961.” It was 50 years ago this month — on Thanksgiving Day 1960 — that the University of Denver played its last football game. At the time, no one knew it was the last game, […]

On Oct. 2, 1926, the University of Denver football team stepped onto the gridiron of Hilltop Stadium for the first time, achieving a 27-7 victory over archrival Colorado School of Mines. With room for up to 25,000 fans, the new stadium far surpassed the makeshift field at University Park — […]

“Avoid needless crowding … Smother your coughs and sneezes … Wash your hands before eating … ” These words of advice bring to mind warnings heard around the world during the recent H1N1/swine flu scare, but they were actually uttered in the fall of 1918 by Dr. William Sharpley, Denver […]

Football may have left DU in 1961, but Pioneers hockey more than filled the gap, going from an athletic also-ran in the late 1940s to one of the country’s most talked-about college programs in the 1960s. The DU hockey program, which began in 1949, celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. […]

On May 4, 1970, a group of DU students gathered in the student union to discuss the invasion of Cambodia, a regional expansion of the Vietnam War, announced by President Richard Nixon four days earlier on April 30. The students formed the Ad Hoc Committee to End the War and […]

In 1919, a series of bombings turned a football rivalry between DU and the School of Mines into all-out intercollegiate war.

“Radio should supply an outlet for emotion and be a vehicle for expression,” declared sophomore John “Nile” Wendorf (BA ’72) in 1970. It was the height of the Vietnam protest era and Wendorf, general manager of student-run campus radio station KVDU, had recently secured the last noncommercial FM radio frequency […]

Clark Secrest, writing in Colorado Heritage magazine in 1992, pointed out that the short-lived town of South Denver had its own railway and its own university, but almost no saloons. The original boundaries of South Denver extended from Colorado Boulevard to the east, Pecos Street to the west, Yale Avenue […]

The only thing most people know about Mary Reed is that her ghost is said to haunt the DU building that bears her name. But there is more to her story. Born in Bucyrus, Ohio, on Oct. 8, 1875, Mary Dean Johnson traveled to Colorado in the late 1800s, met […]