News Release

A new illustrated history celebrating The Johns Hopkins University's upcoming 125th anniversary will be published in October, depicting the university's rise from a faculty of five and two buildings at Howard and Eutaw streets in Baltimore to one of the most influential academic institutions in the world.

Johns Hopkins: Knowledge for the World includes more than 400 color and black-and-white photographs, including some images never previously published. It tells the history of the university, in many cases in the words of those who made or witnessed it, including founding president Daniel Coit Gilman, Nobel laureate Daniel Nathans and dozens of alumni, faculty, staff and friends of the university.

"This is a stunning book visually, but it's far more than just another coffee table picture book," said Ross Jones, vice president and secretary emeritus of the university and chairman of its 125th Anniversary Committee. "It's an engrossing, comprehensive account of an institution that in many ways has changed the world."

The book -- published in anticipation of the university's 125th anniversary in 2001 -- was conceived, researched, written and edited by Mame Warren. She is an oral historian and the author and editor of seven previous books about Maryland, Baltimore, the Chesapeake Bay, and other subjects. Warren built the book on themes from Gilman's 1876 inaugural address, still regarded as a guidebook for his successors as president. She employed phrases from the speech as titles for each of the 12 chapters, demonstrating how Gilman's hopes for the radically different "research university" he was creating have come to fruition over 125 years.

Knowledge for the World recounts the well-known stories: CPR was invented at Johns Hopkins, as were the "blue baby operation" and a "proximity fuze" that helped the Allies win World War II. The rest of the world borrowed Hopkins-developed concepts of the modern medical school and school of public health.

But the book also tells the stories of the undergraduates who stole the University of Maryland's terrapin mascot in 1947, and played baseball in Cuba in 1986 or music in Moscow in 1987. It covers changing student life through the decades -- class banquets and formal dances, Vietnam protests, coffee houses, streaking, undergraduate coeducation, anatomy class for med students -- and the special roles at Hopkins of graduate and part-time students. In narratives by prominent Hopkins men and women, it addresses issues like "What makes scientists tick?" It looks at the university's role around the world and even into outer space.

Mame Warren will discuss the book, the process of researching and writing it and Johns Hopkins University history in two appearances in Baltimore, both free and open to the public. On Oct. 18, she will give a lunchtime talk in the university's "Wednesday Noon Series" in Shriver Hall on the Homewood campus. On Wednesday, Nov. 1, at 5:30 p.m. she will present a talk and book signing for the Friends of the Libraries and the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association. That event will also be held at Shriver Hall.

Johns Hopkins: Knowledge for the World
Published by The Johns Hopkins University
Distributed by Johns Hopkins University Press
288 pages; 420 illustrations
$60
ISBN 0-8018-6614-6

To order copies of the book, contact the Johns Hopkins University Press by calling 1-800-537-5487 or going to http://www.press.jhu.edu.

Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/    Information on automatic e-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.