ABOUT THE TIMELINE

The timeline juxtaposes key events at Drexel with historic national and world events. All of the Drexel Presidents were affected by outside events including economic crises, World Wars, and movements for social and political change. Thinking about Drexel’s history in the context of greater world events allows the happenings at Drexel to be viewed through different lenses. For instance, Drexel President James Creese visited the Soviet Union in the late 1950’s, during the Cold War era. Creese’s visit and the documents memorializing it are an important sidenote to Drexel’s growth as a competitive research university.

The timeline is constructed using open source software developed as part of the SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unlike Environments) project, a joint project conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries and MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory) and sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Timeline homepage describes this software as a “DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events (not unlike) Google Maps for time-based information”. In this instance, data from an XML file is accessed to add events to the timeline. We thank them for making such elegant, open source software solutions available for public use.

Drexel Events    World Events     World events over a span of time

Note that, in general, dates associated with this timeline are accurate to the year only.
Some more well-known events are accurate to the day.