Harvard College

Harvard College is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees (the other being Harvard Extension School). Founded in 1636 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and one of the most prestigious in the world.

History

The "New College" came into existence in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court (colonial legislature, second oldest in British America) of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—though without a single building, instructor, or student. In 1638, the college became home for North America's first known printing press, carried by the ship John of London. Three years later the college was renamed in honor of deceased Charlestown minister John Harvard (1607–1638) who had bequeathed to the school his entire library and half of his monetary estate.

Harvard's first instructor, schoolmaster Nathaniel Eaton (1610–1674), was also its first instructor to be dismissed—in 1639, for overstrict discipline. The school's first students were graduated in 1642. In 1665, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, (c. 1643–1666), a native/indigenous American, "from the Wampanoag … did graduate from Harvard, the first Indian to do so in the colonial period."