The past 150 years of University history are on display at Hill Memorial Library.”Campus Chronicle: 150 Years of LSU,” opened in the library February 22, and it contains documents and images from Hill’s archives that tell the story of the University’s history. The exhibit runs at Hill Memorial through May 29.”For the sesquicentennial, we’re focusing on LSU history, and it’s a really rich history,” said Elaine Smyth, head of special collections. “It really shows the striving the University has made to be a first class institution, and that has been our ambition all along for 150 years.”Librarians picked records from the archives highlighting various parts of the University’s history rather than focusing on only one thread, said Exhibitions Coordinator Leah Wood Jewett.”Sometimes when people think of a University history, you might think of a one-dimensional idea of a history of a school,” Jewett said. “But we wanted to get into all the different topics.” The exhibit covers topics including student life, athletics, politics and the University’s military traditions.”The challenge really is picking out things that will both be very characteristic [of the exhibit] but also individually interesting enough to draw people’s attention,” Smyth said.University historian Barry Cowan said he spent four months piecing together the exhibit, which is made up almost exclusively of items from the University archives.Cowan, who has worked in the archives for 12 years, said he wanted to approach the exhibit from the student perspective.”I like to look at it from the student aspect,” Cowan said. “I was a student at LSU, and it was always a special time for me.”The University began with a military focus, Cowan said. There were only male students from 1860 to 1906, and the ROTC was mandatory until 1969.Jewett said the exhibit shows how student life was different in the University’s early days.”If you think life is hard now, look at these guys who had to wear wool uniforms, had one hour of recreation time and weren’t allowed to gossip,” she said.The University began to transition from its strong military character in the 1960s. The student body became politically charged and held large-scale protest events against the Vietnam War, Cowan said.Jewett said an encompassing exhibit like this one also serves to make people aware of the resources available at Hill Memorial Library.”The difference of putting things on display at a special collections library versus a museum is when an exhibit is down, you can go into our reading room and request these items and handle them,” Jewett said. “It’s really an advertisement for what you can see.”——Contact Ryan Buxton at [email protected]