Hasty Pudding Club is established in Cambridge.

Named for the poor quality food fed to student’s by the first master of Harvard College, the secret social club is founded by 21 students in a Harvard dormitory room. Its purpose is to promote “friendship and patriotism.” Subsequently the oldest theatrical organization in the U.S., it stages its first production, Bombastes Furioso on December 13, 1844, and its first annual spring musical (in which men are cast in female roles), a takeoff of Virgil’s Aeneid, Dido and Aeneas, in 1882. Subsequent cast members include John F. Kennedy, Jack Lemmon. and Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. Women are first cast in productions in 2019.