Twenty-three year old Flora Richardson delivers KU's first valedictory address on her way to becoming the University's first female graduate.

Mathmatics and astronomy professor F. W. Bardwell dies at 46. During the Civil War Bardwell, a white officer, was a member of the 3rd United States Colored Infantry Regiment.

Lewis Lindsay Dyche accepts a KU chair in anatomy, physiology, and taxidermy.

KU Chancellor Francis H. Snow announces that he will give a series of University Extension lectures on evolution, a move that provokes much criticism from local religious leaders.

Dr. Simeon Bishop Bell, a Wyandotte County physician and real estate speculator, offers KU $75,000 in land and money to build a new hospital and medical college in present-day Kansas City, Kansas.

KU physics and engineering professor, Lucien I. Blake, successfully transmits the first long distance ship-to-shore message using underwater wireless technology.

KU Chancellor Frank Strong asks noted Kansas City landscape architect George Kessler to prepare the University’s first formal campus plan.

The forerunner of the University of Kansas School of Nursing begins its first day of classes under the direction of Pearl Laptad, the first of three early and influential nursing education leaders at KU.

The University of Kansas Board of Regents chooses acclaimed state public health advocate Dr. Samuel J. Crumbine to become dean of the KU School of Medicine.

Dr. Ralph H. Major joins the KU School of Medicine faculty, becoming both professor and chairman of the Department of Pathology, and launching a career “that can never be measured in terms any more precise than immense or profound.”

Evangelist Billy Sunday, nationally known for his passionate support of prohibition and revivalist crusades, congratulates Kansans for being the “least illiterate” people in the country in a speech to more than 1,800 KU students and faculty and members of the Kansas Editorial Association at Robinson Gymnasium.

Lt. William T. Fitzsimons, a KU alum and US Army doctor serving in France, becomes the first American casualty of World War I.

With no other candidates willing to take the job, Dr. Harry R. Wahl, professor and department chairman of pathology, is named acting dean of the KU School of Medicine, inaugurating a 24-year period that will become known as “The Wahl Years.”

Elizabeth M. Watkins begins building her philanthropic legacy to the University of Kansas with the opening of Watkins Scholarship Hall, named in honor of her late husband.

Genevieve Harman, whose undergraduate efforts on behalf of housing cooperatives will result in a KU women’s co-op residence being named in her honor, albeit with the occasional misspelling, begins her first day of classes.

Dr. Logan Clendening, a leading medical historian, a newspaper columnist appearing in 383 newspapers, and author of one of the best selling medical books of the 20th Century (The Human Body), dies in Kansas City.

KU comes into uncontested control of one of the world’s foremost ornithological libraries—its first major acquisition of rare books—when the Kansas Supreme Court rules that an agreement signed more than four years earlier by Ralph Ellis, Jr. is valid as a will.

Pharmacology professor Dr. W. Clarke Wescoe becomes dean of the University of Kansas School of Medicine and director of the KU Medical Center, ushering in a period of “momentous change and daring innovation” at 39th and Rainbow Boulevard.

Henry Fortunato, the creator of kuhistory.com, entered the world January 8, 1956, on Long Island, New York. Serendipity had him become a resident of Kansas, a student of KU and, ultimately, the narrator of this popular institutional history.

KU celebrates Carrie Watson Day, honoring the University’s first and longest-serving professional librarian.

In the first of two stunts that would enter into campus legend, KU art student Dan Wessel, who preferred to be known as “The Great Wesselini” and similar monikers, attempts to fly his homemade glider over Memorial Stadium by rolling down a 32-foot ramp north of the Campanile.

KU bestows its highest award, the Distinguished Service Citation, upon Philip F. Anschutz for his record of philanthropy, community service and support of humanitarian causes.

1936 University of Kansas graduate John B. McLendon was enshrined for a second time into the Naismith Hall of Fame on Friday evening, September 9, 2016. Originally enshrined as a conributor, McLendon was inducted as a coach along with 9 other inductees into the class of 2016.