Football

Football as an organized sport at UNC began in 1888. The university's first football game —and the first college football game played in North Carolina —was a loss to Wake Forest in a game played at the state fair. Many university traditions are tied to the growth of football and oth...

Beat Dook Parade

The practice of misspelling the name of UNC—Chapel Hill's rival as "Dook" probably began in the 1930s, when "Beat Dook" banners were common at pep rallies. The annual Beat Dook Parade, sponsored by Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, began in 1948 with a procession of twenty-eight c...

Communism

Having weathered complaints of excessively liberal bias since the leadership of Frank Porter Graham in the 1930s, the university faced new accusations, beginning in the 1950s, of being a training ground for Communists. The claims were frequent enough that consolidated university president Gordon Gra...

Taylor Hall

When it first opened in 1969, this building was known as Swing Building. It housed classrooms, a lecture hall, and labs for the School of Medicine. In 1989 the building was renamed for Isaac M. Taylor, an alumnus (class of 1942) who joined the faculty of the School of Medicine in 1952 and served as ...