Mr. Bethell, former editor of Harvard Magazine, guides readers through an engaging history of the modern university as it mirrored the ups and downs of this century--wars, the Depression, the atomic and electronic ages. It is a heritage of which not only Cantabrigians but all Americans can be proud.
   --King Features Weekly Service

John Bethell provides his general readers with "a panoramic view" of Harvard that must be judged a "just representation," and in the words of Dr. Johnson, it "will please many, and please long."
   --Michael Shinagel, Harvard Review

In the early years of the twentieth century, President Charles William Eliot fought to keep Harvard from becoming a refuge for "the stupid sons of the rich." A. Lawrence Lowell, a tireless builder, gave the modern University its physical structure. James Conant helped forge a wartime alliance of universities, industry, and government that sustained an astonishingly prosperous postwar epoch.


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John T. Bethell is the Senior Editor of The American Scholar and a contributing editor at Harvard Magazine, where he was editor from 1966 to 1995.

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