Biography of Quad

Harvard junior Zane Jones became immediately captivated when looking through the scrapbook of Marion Hathway.

The collection of notes, photographs, newspaper clippings, exams, and grades documents Hathway's senior year at Radcliffe College. A student there from 1912 to 1916, the future social worker and educator's scrapbook documents the active role she took in women's suffrage, marching for the vote and speaking to voters on election day.

Jones, a Mather House resident, came across other scrapbooks at the Schlesinger Library from women around that same time, which she eventually focused into a six-page research paper. The assignment, which was part of a new class looking at the history of everyday life at Harvard, helped bring Jones a new appreciation for how people can document their own histories, especially when it comes to places people call home.

"Looking through these women's scrapbooks, I could see how they used these scrapbooks as a means of claiming their own agency," Jones said. "This documentation can serve as a history of the culture of Radcliffe at the time."

This kind of thoughtful interaction with the past is what Harvard history professor and Faculty Dean of Cabot House Ian Miller hoped for when he designed HIST 15B, "Quad Lab: Histories of Technology, Society, and Everyday Life at Harvard."

The course focuses on the lives of students who have lived on the Radcliffe Quadrangle, how Radcliffe and the Quad were designed, major events and evolution of the residential space, and even the inner workings of the buildings themselves.

Formerly the residential campus of Radcliffe College, today the Quad has the look of a traditional college quad bordered by three Houses: Currier, Pforzheimer, and Cabot. It is home to approximately 1,225 undergraduates and 81 staff members and families.

The new course runs like a scientific laboratory where students break down parts of everyday life to understand how they came to be. They have taken guided tours of many prominent spaces, like the libraries, and examined less familiar, more hidden aspects. This has included investigating individual pieces of furniture.