Harvard College was founded in 1636 in New Towne, a settlement itself founded six years earlier in colonial-era Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of the original Thirteen Colonies. In 1638, New Towne was renamed Cambridge, in honor of Cambridge, England, where many of the Colony's settlers had attended the University of Cambridge. In 1639 the school was given the name of Harvard College after its first major benefactor, clergyman John Harvard. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States.
In the late 18th century, Harvard began granting graduate and doctorate-level degrees, and in 1780 the Constitution of Massachusetts recognized it as a university. In 1783, a new medical school was established as the Medical Institution of Harvard University. Thereafter, Harvard College referred exclusively to the undergraduate programs. The stature of the university grew nationally and ultimately globally, as a dozen graduate and professional schools were formed to add to the nucleus of the undergraduate College. The university's other historically influential schools include those of law (1817), business (1908), and Graduate Arts and Sciences (1890). For centuries, Harvard graduates dominated Massachusetts' clerical and civil ranks. Since the late 19th century, Harvard has been one of the most prestigious schools in the world, with the largest library system and financial endowment.__TOC__ 17th century
In 1636, after some 17,000 Puritans had migrated to New England, Harvard was founded in anticipation of the need for training clergy for the new commonwealth, a "church in the wilderness". Harvard was established that year by vote of the Great and General Court, the governing legislative body of colonial-era Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of the original Thirteen Colonies.
Nathaniel Eaton oversaw the college under various titles between 1637 and 1639. In 1638, it received a printing pressthe first in North Americaand it received a second press in 1659.
On March 13, 1639, the college was named Harvard College in honor of the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, a University of Cambridge alumnus who willed the new school £779 pounds sterling and his library of some 400 books.
The first commencement of Harvard College was in 1642, with only nine students. Benjamin Woodbridge was the first person to receive a Harvard College degree.
In the 1640s, Harvard College established the Harvard Indian College, which educated Native American students. It was only attended by a handful of students, only one of whom graduated.
In 1643, a Harvard publication defined the college's purpose: "[to] advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust."
In its early years, the college trained many Puritan Congregational ministers and offered a classical curriculum based on the English university model exemplified by the University of Cambridge, where many colonial Massachusetts leaders had studied prior to emigrating to the colony. Harvard College never formally affiliated with any particular Protestant denomination, but its curriculum conformed to the tenets of Puritanism.
The colony charter creating the Harvard Corporation was granted in 1650 at the beginning of the English Interregnum. When Henry Dunster, the college's second president from 1640 to 1654, abandoned Puritanism in favor of the English Baptist faith in 1654, he provoked a controversy that highlighted two distinct approaches to dealing with dissent in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The colony's Puritan leaders, whose own religion was born of dissent from the mainstream Church of England, generally worked for reconciliation with members who questioned matters of Puritan theology, but responded much more harshly to outright rejection of Puritanism.
Dunster's conflict with the colony's magistrates began when he failed to have his infant son baptized, believing as an adherent of the Believers baptism of English Baptists and/or Anabaptists that only adults should be baptized. Efforts to restore Dunster to Puritan orthodoxy failed, and his apostasy proved untenable to colony leaders who had entrusted him in his job as Harvard's president to uphold the colony's religious mission, thus he represented a threat to the stability of society. Dunster exiled himself in 1654 and moved to nearby Plymouth Colony, where he died in 1658.Timothy L. Wood, "'I Spake the Truth in the Feare of God': the Puritan Management of Dissent During the Henry Dunster Controversy," Historical Journal of Massachusetts 2005 33(1): 1-19, Because it had been unlawful for the colony to establish a college, King Charles II rescinded the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter in 1684 by a writ of scire facias.
In 1692, the leading Puritan divine Increase Mather became Harvard's sixth president. He replaced pagan classics with books by Christian authors in ethics classes and maintained discipline in the college. The Harvard "Lawes" of 1642 and the "Harvard College Laws of 1700" testify to its original high level of discipline.Laws and Statutes for Students of Harvard College Students were required to observe rules of pious decorum inconceivable in the 19th century, and ultimately to prove their fitness for the bachelor's degree by showing that they could "read the original of the Old and New Testament into the Latin tongue, and resolve them logically".Barrett Wendell, Cotton Mather, the Puritan priest (1897) p 35 Harvard's leadership and alumni, including Increase Mather and his son Cotton Mather, played central roles in the Salem Witch Trials in 16921693.
The town of Dedham was founded in 1636, the same year as the college. The first minister of the First Church and Parish in Dedham, John Allin, served as an overseer, and every minister through 1861 was connected to the university. Given its population and modest means, the support the community provided to the college was generous. Allin donated two cows, presumably to provide milk for the president and tutors.
During Harvard's early years, the town of Cambridge maintained order at the college and provided economic support, as the local Puritan minister had direct oversight of Harvard and ensured the orthodoxy of its leadership. By 1700, Harvard was strong enough to regulate and discipline its own people, and to a large extent the direction in which support and assistance flowed was reversed, Harvard now providing financial support for local economic expansion, improvements to public health, and the construction of local roads, meeting houses, and schools.John Daniel Burton, Puritan Town and Gown: Harvard College and Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1636–1800. PhD dissertation, College of William and Mary, 1996. 314 pp. DAI 1997 58(2): 560-A. DA9720973
18th century The early motto of Harvard was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae, meaning "Truth for Christ and the Church". In the early classes, half the graduates became ministers, which diminished to 15% by the 1760s, and ten of Harvard's first twelve presidents were ministers. Systematic theological instruction was inaugurated in 1721. By 1827, Harvard became a nucleus of theological teaching in New England.Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (1935) p. 300
The end of Mather's presidency in 1701 marked the start of a long struggle at Harvard between orthodoxy and liberalism. In 1708, John Leverett, Harvard's first secular president, was appointed as Harvard's seventh president. Leverett left the curriculum largely intact, but sought to keep the college independent of the overwhelming influence of any single Christian denomination.John Leverett - History - Office of the President
Harvard alumni were enormously supportive of the American Revolution with Patriot alumni exceeding Loyalists seven to one. During the Revolutionary War, seven alumni were killed in their service of the Continental Army.Jack P. Greene, "Harvard Men in a Changing World," Massachusetts Historical Review 2007 9: 166-176,
In the second half of the 18th century, Harvard began granting graduate and doctorate-level degrees. In 1780, the Constitution of Massachusetts recognized Harvard College as a university, and when in 1783 a new medical school was established, it was given the formal name of the Medical Institution of Harvard University.
19th century College/school Harvard College Medicine Divinity Law Dental Medicine Arts and Sciences Business Extension Design Education Public Health Government Engineering& Applied Sciences
Unitarians Throughout the 18th century, Enlightenment ideas of the power of reason and free will became widespread among Congregational ministers, putting those ministers and their congregations in tension with more traditionalist, Calvinist parties.Gary J. Dorrien. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900, Volume 1 . Westminster John Knox Press, 2001
Following the death of Hollis Professor of Divinity David Tappan in 1803 and that of Harvard president Joseph Willard a year later, a struggle broke out over their replacements. Henry Ware was elected to the chair in 1805, and the liberal Samuel Webber was appointed Harvard president two years later, signaling a changing of the tide from the dominance of traditional ideas at Harvard to the dominance of liberal, Arminian ideas, defined by traditionalists as Unitarian ideas.Peter S. Field Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Making of a Democratic Intellectual Rowman & Littlefield, 2003
Science In 1846, the natural history lectures of Louis Agassiz were acclaimed both in New York and on his campus at Harvard College. Agassiz's approach was distinctly idealist and posited Americans' "participation in the Divine Nature" and the possibility of understanding "intellectual existences". Agassiz's perspective on science combined observation with intuition and the assumption that one can grasp the "divine plan" in all phenomena. When it came to explaining life-forms, Agassiz resorted to matters of shape based on a presumed archetype for his evidence. This dual view of knowledge was in concert with the teachings of Common Sense Realism derived from Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, whose works were part of the Harvard curriculum at the time. The popularity of Agassiz's efforts to "soar with Plato" probably also derived from other writings to which Harvard students were exposed, including Platonic treatises by Ralph Cudworth, John Norris and in a Romantic vein Samuel Coleridge. The library records at Harvard reveal that the writings of Plato and his early modern and Romantic followers were almost as regularly read during the 19th century as those of the "official philosophy" of the more empirical and more deistic Scottish school.David K. Nartonis, "Louis Agassiz and the Platonist Story of Creation at Harvard, 1795–1846," Journal of the History of Ideas 2005 66(3): 437-449, in JSTOR
Elitism
Between 1830 and 1870, Harvard became "privatized".Ronald Story The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800–1870, (1980), While the Federalists controlled state government, Harvard had prospered and the 1824 defeat of the Federalist Party in Massachusetts allowed the renascent Democratic-Republicans to block state funding of private universities. By 1870, the politicians and ministers that heretofore had made up the university's board of overseers had been replaced by Harvard alumni drawn from Boston's upper-class business and professional community and funded by private endowment.