Claudine Gay, invested as the 30th President of Harvard University on July 1, 2023, was the first black and second woman to hold that post. Under criticism for her testimony in Congress about antisemitism at Harvard, followed by allegations of plagiarism in her...

Although we both were recognized as grandsons of Dr. Howe at the formal celebration of the Centennial on October 13, 2023, only my brother was present. I absented myself from any participation in that event for the reasons set forth in my email to Bev Coughlin dated...

A product of the American century, Belmont Hill was founded in the wake of the country’s emergence from the Great War as a major power. Despite almost failing as the Great Depression morphed into World War II, by war’s end the School had recovered, and in the war’s...

Eighty percent of all Russian boys born in 1923 were dead by 1945, or so states a recent article. Although without citation, it’s a reasonable figure given the former Soviet Union’s total estimated losses of 27 million in the war with Nazi Germany. Nothing in the...

Where the Belmont Hill bell stood for 91 years, there now sits a marble bench bearing the inscription: “This bench represents our clear intention to engage with ideas and symbols from our past and establish a future that reflects inclusivity and a sense of belonging...

Textual analysis of the “Per Aspera ad Astra” (through adversity to the stars) letter does not give the full story concerning the bell’s removal, which was precipitated in haste in response to new student demands presented in the wake of the George Floyd incident and while the School’s campus was rather isolated from its larger community by the pandemic…

By a letter dated August 11, 2020, to the Belmont Hill Community under the heading “Per Aspera ad Astra” (through adversity to the stars), Jon Biotti, President of the Board of Trustees, and Greg Schneider, Head of School, announced the removal of the Belmont Hill bell from the campus…

My father recorded the arrival of the Belmont Hill bell (Memories, p. 17):
“It was also in either the second or third year of the school that the big bell near Bolles arrived. Mrs. Atkins arranged to have it shipped…

During the era of the Lower School, the seventh grade (now the First Form) was called Class D. Befitting the most senior class in the Lower School, its members were the only students permitted to use the main steps to the new building, which opened in February 1946,...

The Very Rev. Francis B. Sayre, Jr. ‘32, longtime Dean of the National Cathedral (1951-1978) and one of the first recipients of the Distinguished Alumni Award (1962), entered the School in 1925.