Harvard university
Fifty-three named portraits from the Harvard Class of 1860 survive at the Library of Congress, annotated by a classmate who recorded each man’s fate in the Civil War.
Henry Dunster Harvard president saved the college from collapse in 1640, built its first graduating class, and was expelled for questioning infant baptism.
Ether Dome anaesthesia 1846: the story of the October morning that ended surgical pain, and the bitter four-way dispute over who deserved the credit.
Nathaniel Eaton served as Harvard College’s first master from 1638 until his dismissal in September 1639, when the Massachusetts Bay General Court found him guilty of savage beatings of students and the systematic near-starvation of the men in his charge, making him the first administrator in Harvard’s history and the first to be removed from
In September 1638, a young minister named John Harvard died in Charlestown, Massachusetts, of consumption. He was thirty years old, had been in the colony barely a year, and had never taught a single class at the institution that would bear his name. Yet his deathbed decision, to leave half his estate and the whole
On the evening of 1 September 1795, twenty-one Harvard juniors gathered in the college room of a student named Nymphas Hatch. They were there to found a society. The declared purpose, written into the first minutes of what would become the Hasty Pudding Club, was “to cherish feelings of friendship and patriotism.” The practical requirement
In the spring of 1895, Mary Whiton Calkins sat the doctoral examination at Harvard University. She had spent three years working through the philosophy and psychology curriculum, studying privately with William James and Josiah Royce because Harvard’s rules barred women from attending the university’s courses as enrolled students. She had written a dissertation. She had
Harvard In Memoriam volumes In the autumn of 1865, Thomas Wentworth Higginson sat down to write letters. The war was over. Harvard had sent roughly a thousand men into uniform and 136 of them had not come back, and Higginson (abolitionist, colonel of the first Black regiment in the Union Army, Class of 1841) had
