It began in 1837 when a clever Columbia College student familiar with his school’s history discovered the perfect excuse for a party: Columbia’s fiftieth anniversary. Forget that the school had been founded in 1754. Forget that the old name, King’s College—alma mater of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Robert Livingston, among others—had been shed in 1784 in favor of Columbia. It was on April 13, 1787, that the New York State legislature ratified the school’s original charter, reconfirming the name Columbia and transferring control of the college from public to private hands. When that canny student of 1837 proposed a celebration to his 120 schoolmates, they gave it their hearty endorsement. Faculty, alumni, and trustees nodded their approval. “There is some idea of a little splutter for the occasion,” one sophomore wrote in his diary. “Very good, and the more fun the better.”

On April 13 a five-block-long procession paraded from Columbia’s Lower Manhattan campus to St. John’s Chapel, where the audience sweated through speeches, poems, odes, and fourteen honorary degrees. After their prolonged confinement, students streamed back to Columbia with far less decorum than they had shown upon leaving it, snatching apples and potatoes from grocers’ carts to toss back and forth high overhead.

The 1887 centennial was a more elaborate affair. At the Metropolitan Opera House, where the great ceremony was staged, students were banished to the highest balconies, from which they let fly abuse and paper planes on the dignitaries below. After the long opening speech, according to one young wit writing in the yearbook, came the “pathetically pertinent chorale ‘Awake my soul.’ ” It was followed by an oration, a hymn, and then the poem “The Progress of Learning”: “Hail, old King’s College! Homestead of our yearning!/ Columbia’s Arya Varta pre-historic!/ England’s Corinthian shaft on Holland’s Doric!” The wit observed: “Oh! what a poem! What rhymes! What sentiments! Space and the poet’s grey hairs restrain our pen from criticism. We pass it over with a respect that we did not observe during its reading. …”

The celebration ended the next night with a march so riotous that fifty policemen were required to give escort. Wrapped in nightshirts and sheets, Columbians trooped through town shouting bawdy songs and blasting on tin horns. The Columbia Spectator reported that a few students dressed as girls “who had come out on purpose to mash the boys, and who were much admired for their huge bustles and striped stockings.” Dozens of others jumped aboard passing streetcars, dashed from one end to the other, and leaped off the rear platforms. “For a crowd of students out on a spree,” wrote the yearbook wit, “we did not think we transgressed the bounds of propriety.”

Back on campus, fireworks exploded and a bonfire blazed hot, fed with barrels and fences scavenged from the surrounding neighborhood. “These wild orgies continued till a very late hour,” the Spectator concluded. “On the whole, everyone agrees that our celebration has knocked the spots out of anything that has been seen before. …”

Or after. No competition arose in 1937, when students allowed the event to slip by virtually unnoticed. But Columbia’s celebration of its two hundredth anniversary this month will undoubtedly do justice to the occasion.

Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, one of the Confederacy’s most skilled professional soldiers, recognized an opportunity when he saw one. Retreating from losses in Kentucky and Tennessee, Johnston’s army of fifty thousand had hurried south, pursued by Ulysses S. Grant and his forty-five thousand men. In Corinth, Mississippi, Johnston received word that Grant had halted beside the Tennessee River not far north near a meetinghouse called Shiloh Church, encamped with few defensive precautions to await reinforcement by Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s army of twenty-five thousand. If the next encounter was to be a Southern victory, Johnston knew he would have to attack before Buell arrived. On the morning of April 6, the Southern general swung into his saddle and led his troops into the Battle of Shiloh. Before it was over, thirteen thousand Union men and ten thousand Confederates lay dead.

Most officers and soldiers on both sides of the line were green as summer apples. On the first day of battle, their inexperience was made plain. Troop movements were confused, units became entangled, and many men dropped their guns and ran. “It was an awful thing to hear no intermission in firing,” one Confederate wrote home, “and hear the clatter of small arms and the whizing minny balls and rifle shot and the sing of grape shot the hum of canon balls and the roaring of the bomb shell and explosion of the same seaming to be a thousand every minute.”

Yet there was no rout, and after long hours of hard fighting, the Confederates emerged on top. Foot by foot they forced the Federals back toward the Tennessee and would have pushed them into it were it not for several thousand men who stood their ground along an overgrown country lane. Dubbed the hornet’s nest, the lane was blasted by Rebel artillery and repeatedly attacked. Countless men died there, including General Johnston. But the Union soldiers held on until the sun fell low in the sky and they found themselves cut off. They surrendered, and the Confederates lost the remainder of the day rearranging their battle line.

That night a thunderstorm drenched the living where they camped among the dead. “O it was too shocking too horrible,” wrote a Confederate, who had looked out over the storm-lit carnage. “God grant that I may never be the partaker in such scenes again … when released from this I shall ever be an advocate of peace.” Other Rebels, less troubled by the dead, ransacked the Union camps they had overrun. Before the night was over, one officer wrote, “half of our army was straggling back to Corinth loaded down with belts, sashes, swords, officers’ uniforms, Yankee letters, daguerreotypes of Yankee sweethearts, likenesses of Grant, Buell, Smith, Prentiss, McClellan, Lincoln, etc., some on Yankee mules and horses, some on foot, some on the ground prostrate with Cincinnati whiskey.”

Confederates blamed the next day’s reversal of fortune on Union whiskey and the loss of General Johnston, but most historians agree that the Confederates’ only hope had been to crush the Union forces in one blow, before Buell’s army arrived. When the sun rose on April 7, it was too late, for Buell had crossed the Tennessee. Fighting resumed, but Johnston’s second-in-command, Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard, could only postpone what he ultimately did sometime after midday—call the retreat. The battered Union army, incapable of pursuit, let them go, but not for long. After the Battle of Shiloh, the war in the West belonged to the Union.

Near midnight on the clear, cold evening of April 14, the White Star liner Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic. The ship was not only the largest and most luxurious afloat; she was also called unsinkable. But two hours and forty minutes later, the Titanic up-ended and sank two miles to the bottom of the ocean, taking fifteen hundred people with her.

The world had never seen such a glorious ship. She stretched the length of four city blocks and rose eleven stories high from keel to funnel top. Everything conceivable had its place aboard: a squash court, a swimming pool, and a gym equipped with mechanical bicycles, horses, and even camels; a Turkish bath, a French sidewalk cafe, and a richly furnished restaurant where rose-colored shades on tabletop lamps cast a benign glow. The finest first-class suite cost nearly fifty thousand of today’s dollars for a transatlantic crossing, but it guaranteed the privacy of one’s very own promenade deck. The news of such luxury titillated high society, and its luminaries quickly secured their places on the Titanic for her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. The Astors, Wideners, and Thayers were aboard; and down in steerage, bunks were filled by more than seven hundred passengers, mostly immigrants heading for what they hoped would be their lucky break in America.

The story of what happened to these people is a familiar one: how the speeding Titanic disregarded repeated warnings of an ice field blocking her path; how passengers couldn’t believe she was sinking and so wasted precious time by refusing to board the lifeboats; how the nearby liner Californian watched the Titanic’s rockets signaling for help but did nothing. Women and children were put aboard lifeboats before men, and the partings that took place on deck between husbands and wives and fathers and children revealed the span of human nature: there were stoic partings, frenzied ones, and then some that never occurred, for certain women preferred to remain with their husbands. But hundreds of women were never given that choice—those in third class. Ninety-four percent of first-and second-class women and children were placed in lifeboats; only forty-two percent of those in third class had such good fortune. In fact, about the same percentage of steerage children as first-class men found their way aboard lifeboats.

But there weren’t enough lifeboats anyway. The Titanic carried eighteen, more than were required by law but far too few for the ship’s 2,201 passengers and crew. Together they could hold only 1,178 people. Partly due to the passengers’ disbelief, and partly because of the moment’s heedless panic, many of the lifeboats were lowered half-empty. In the end, only 705 escaped in the small craft, with room for 473 more. And yet after the Titanic plunged beneath the surface, only one of the lifeboats rowed back to save the drowning, whose cries carried clearly over the water.

For several hours, the boats rocked their shivering cargo beneath the stars. And then, at 4:00 A.M., the liner Carpathia steamed up after a three-hour race north and quickly took aboard the survivors. Two women from the Titanic sat together in an isolated corner and refused coffee when it was offered: “Go away. We have just seen our husbands drown.”