Harvard College is created.

Originally New College, it is founded at a meeting at the First Church in Boston. The Massachusetts General Court awards 400 pounds (more than half of the colony’s tax levy in 1635) to establish, “A schoale or colledge. . . the next Court to appoint where and what building.” Although Marblehead vies for the honor, the court directs that the school be located in Cambridge (then Newtowne) on November 15, 1637, The first college in the British Colonies, it opens in 1638,* is renamed Harvard College in 1639* and recognized as university by Massachusetts Constitution in 1780. Barrett Wendell subsequently writes, “Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, Harvard College remained little more than a boys’ school.”