1900 A HISTORY IN PRESENT TIME 2001
Every student who has passed through this school has had the same sensation for most of their Yale careers: So what if other people went here? This is our place, the scene of our vitality! But toward the end the truth comes clear. We are to be here for a time only, and the same current that brought us to our college years will now lead us beyond them - to be replaced, in new times, by new young folk, whose energy, talent, and friendship will give new life to our past enterprise, then make way for others in their turn. The present volume, the most remarkable of many that have marked the Yale tercentennial, is a powerful reflection on this fact. . . In reality it is a history of Yale College in the twentieth century. But it is not a work of generalized narrative history. Rather, it is a book of Yale life, registering, year by year, the things that happened when that time was present time, with the look and feel of life itself. Thanks to the compiler's endless care, unmatched archival labors, and extraordinary visual sense, each page of this volume retrieves the forgotten life of past moments, in pictures that read less like records of events than bursts of recovered vitality. But each page, however absorbing, is also only a page, succeeded by another, then another - so the book itself teaches a lesson in time's ways.
Dean Richard H Brodhead '68 (now president of Duke University)
