University of Michigan - Michiganensian Yearbook (Ann Arbor, MI)

Page 7 text:

School spirit and tradition are frowned upon by many modern students as corny cliches, but call them what you will, the events and personalities that have formed Michigan ' s vital history are as important to us today as they were when first introduced. Fifty years is an arbitrary figure but good photography is a comparatively recent art, so, we, the editors, decided on a half century as a sufficient period to show pictorially and editorially how Michigan has grown to its present size and importance. Many things have changed in that period, including the seal of the University which appears historically on our cover with its Ann Arbor founding date 1837. In July 1929 this was changed to 1817 when it was decided the University actually dated to a Detroit birthplace in 1817. This and other facts are pointed out in this, the 1948 Michiganensian, your University yearbook and school record. Buck Dawson 3

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The name Michiganensian was coined at a mass meeting in 1896 where students had gathered to demand a new and more representative yearbook. Someone shouted from the crowd let ' s name it Michiganensis, a possible Latin form of the word Michigan . As usually happens in mass meetings, the scholar was drowned out before he had finished, and in the confusion he was mistakenly credited with naming the new yearbook. Michiganensian, Ensian, that ' s great, shouted the mob and a new word had been created by the eager students. Even the Latin scholar knew it was useless to remind them that his suggestion had been Michiganensis and not Michiganensian, so the new title stuck and has remained ever since. Even as Michiganensian is original as a word and a yearbook, so, too, is the 1948 edition original among Michiganensians. Never before in its fifty-one-year history has the Michiganensian made so many changes in one year. Completely reorganized from cover to cover, this book presents the vital history of the University of Michigan in a completely different format. The record is still here, as it must be in any yearbook, but continuity, readability, and organization for the reader ' s interest are presented in a new, simplified and logical order. A yearbook ' s purpose must be to mirror with words and pictures the year at college. In this, our Rose Bowl year, Michiganensian presents both the routine record and the extra- ordinary events of the 1947-48 school year. But our purpose is twofold in this year ' s Ensian because, in our first completely post- war year, we must not only mirror the year at Michigan but revive and relive the pre-war traditions which may have disappeared in wartime and post-war apathy.

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Thomas Clarkson Trueblood If a single man could represent Michigan ' s great traditions, its vital his- tory, past, present and future, that man would be Thomas Clarkson Trueblood. For sixty- three years this six-foot, two hundred pound athlete and scholar has been a symbol of Michigan ' s best interest and accomplishments. Born before the Civil War, Thomas Clarkson Trueblood was eight years old when General John Morgan and his famed Confederate Cavalry rode up to his parents ' farm near Salem, Indiana in 1863. This was young Trueby ' s first exposure to vital history which he himself has helped shape for eighty-five years. Today, a young man of ninety-three, Master teacher Trueblood can look back on a life that has spanned the globe, literally and figuratively. The web of interests spun and explored by this great scholar would alone fill the space between the covers of this four hundred and fifty page volume. The voice and influence of his wisdom continues to echo and re-echo throughout the educated world. But since this is a yearbook, not a biography, we must necessarily confine our dedication to that portion of Mr. Trueblood ' s 4